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AOL Tests Video Instant Messaging
An anonymous coward writes "AOL, which only last week asked the FCC to forget about some of those mandatory restrictions put into place in order to clear its merger with Time Warner, apparently isn't wasting any time. In a move that circumvents government-imposed limitations on "advanced" multimedia services, Instant Messaging Planet is reporting that AOL has already started beta testing video messaging services with "push-to-talk" and "record-and-forward" features."
You can actually get the latest build of this beta software from Keyword: beta. Once you are accepted the code name of the application (AOL for BROADBAND / AOL PLUS / AOL SERVICE PACK 1 / AOL 9.0) is actually named Blue Hawaii. The GUI is all blue, And the service has totaly gone through a new face lift from the 8.0 version. I must say I do like the features they are implenting. As the question asked before about the video streams, if both users have broadband connections, the video is actually as good as MS Netmeeting. Its not always the speed of the service, but the frame rate of your camera. Cheaper the camera, slower the frame rate. This beta also includes the many of the fun features of AIM. File transfers, Direct Connect to send pictures, Voice Chat, and a new feature (Webcams). I'm also going to add the latest beta of AIM has resolved most of firewall issues people were having. There are 3 different ways to connect to someone now. It solved all of my issues with my home network firewall and my office firewall. Looks like AOL is on the right track to getitng its service going. The next major feature will be McAfee implenmented into the email service like msn and yahoo currently do. That beta test is going pretty smooth. I just cant wait till they start streaming movies. These large trailers they keep releasing (animatrix / matrix) Rumor is its just a test of what kind of bandwidth they will need. Start small, then go big I guess. Should be intresting how AOL begins the climb back to the top. and out of curiosity, I know we all love to hate it, how many of us actully DO USE AOL? steve
Have you looked at Jabber?
Opensource:
http://www.jabber.org
Commercial Support:
http://www.jabber.com
You can set up a Jabber server, connect securely to
it from Jabber IM clients, and (if you wish) have the
server translate out to AIM, MSN, Y!M, etc.
Translations to other services will not be secure, of
course, unless the external server supported such a
thing ( to my knowledge Y!, MS and AOL do not ).
its amazing that AOL is circumventing the FCC rules, I was pretty disapointed when AOL IM protocol wasn't forced open during the merger but this is ridiculous. To brashlly declare it doesnt hold a dominant control over IM, have they forgotten about AOL IM & ICQ???
News.com article
"The petition argues that AOL's IM services, AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ, face more competition from Microsoft and Yahoo, both of which have launched video conferencing features on their respective IM clients. The petition also disputes the order's original argument that AOL's dominance would increase given the lack of interoperability, now that MSN and Yahoo have amassed millions of users as well.
"There is no longer any plausible reason to conclude either that AOL is dominant or that the market is in danger of 'tipping' to AOL," said Northwestern University professor William P. Rogerson, who provided an affidavit on behalf of AOL Time Warner. "
also alarming, William P. Rogerson is the Chief Economist of the FCC
GAIM, which does AIM/Jabber
:)
Just FYI, GAIM has a plugin archetecture that lets it support just about anything. Out of the box it supports AIM (TOC and OSCAR), ICQ, Yahoo!, MSN, IRC, Jabber, Napster, Zephyr, and Gadu-Gadu. Not to mention that you can get plugins to do everything from spell checking to automagically forwarding messages (via a rule-based system) to a cellphone or email. Plus the newest version has a much nicer UI than any other Linux IM client I've ever used.
(Sorry to shill for GAIM, but the name causes most people to assume it's AIM only, but it's not, and it flat-out r0x0rz
- fader