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AOL and .mac IM Not Entirely Integrated

Posted by pudge on from the one-more-reason-not-to-pay-for-.mac dept.

gsfprez writes "While chatting with some Apple employee friends (with .mac accounts and iChat), we were stumped why we couldn't see each other on AIM. It seems that AOL has decided to take the opportunity -- while integrating the .mac users 'into the fold' -- to modify their AIM protocols so that Open Source clients (like Fire and Trillian) can't see those with '@mac.com' IM accounts, and vise versa. Bottom line: you can't be seen by .mac IM users, and they can't see you, unless you get the crufty, single service AOL IM client. The only positive affirmation of this is from the Fire mailing list. 'Into the fold ... sorta' is more like it." Well, it's still early, this may merely be about bugs that need fixing, rather than intent to block .mac users. We'll see.

2 of 61 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Fire v. iChat by foobar104 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    And yes, I am certain iChat allows you to use your AIM screen name.

    Not that it's necessary, but I'll second that. I've been using my old-as-the-hills AIM screen name with iChat for some time now to chat both with other iChat users (even over Rendezvous over AirPort, which is really cool) or AIM users on both platforms. Since I had an AIM screen name all along, it seemed unnecessary to use my .Mac user name.

  2. Distributed IM service by bmetzler · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This may finally allow AOL to license their servers to over companies and have their own @company.com clients that interoperate. Perhaps Microsoft needs to talk to AOL about licensing again. And Yahoo. and whoever else wants to offer a specialised IM client. I want my bmetzler@yahoo.com AIM ID. That'd be cool.

    -Brent