AOL Opening Up AIM Community to Third Parties

DaffyD writes "Refocusing its vision for AOL Instant Messenger, America Online is endeavoring to revitalize the service by opening up its community and presence to third parties. In addition to partners such as CareerBuilder, AOL is seeking to enlist independent developers to build extended AIM services and hopes to offer a plug-in architecture by the end of the year. ICQ recently added such functionality through its open XML-based Xtras feature. Maybe AOL is feeling the heat from alternatives such as Gaim and Adium."

Comments

Competition

[dcarey]

Yup, nothing like good old competition to make a company become more innovative.

Oh, wait ...

Why No Standard?

[moofdaddy]

Why haven't they come up with a real and competitive standard yet? There are a number of different instant messaging networks out there, AIM, MSN, Yahoo, etc. and while I understand they want to keep their networks closed so they can force people to use their player, why not establish one standard and let people choose which client to use.

Re:Now all they have to do...

[Skye16]

Hell, have you seen their goddam welcome screen for AIM yet (from Aim Express, and I quote):

WHAT?! U R Still On the Old AIM!

AIM 5.9 Allows U To Do So Much More W/ UR Buds

Nice Dilbert tagline

[Weaselmancer]

Refocusing its vision for AOL Instant Messenger, America Online is endeavoring to revitalize the service by opening up its community and presence to third parties.

Refocusing its vision? Endeavoring to revitalize??

I could feel my hair starting to get pointy just reading that much.

Re:here's an idea for 'revitalization'

[superpulpsicle]

Oh so The "A" in AIM stands for America. I thought it was Annoying Instant Messenger.

great

[Arctic Dragon]

Managers will now receive hundreds of "LMAO HER3S MAH RESUM3 FOR CONSIEDRATION LOL!!!!! WTF" messages.

Re:Smart Move, AOL

[randyest]

That used to be the main purpose, and it was good.

But now it seems I'm using it more and more to shut up some colleague who is mis- or un-informed and running off at the mouth.

It's also really handy for passing off a less-experienced person as lead for a picky project manager. I type what to say, he reads the text, he seems capable, we put him "in charge" of the project-that-requires-less-capability-than-the-man ager-thinks (under my supervision, of course) and everyone is happy.

So yeah, I'm sory of like a modern day Cyrano de Bergerac. Without the girl.

Or the nose.

Re:Me, too!

[Captain Splendid]

I just hit the windows key + l on my PC (win2k).

Nothing happened.

Now I'm sad. Why did you make me sad?