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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."
This is one of the larger episodes of back-pedaling that I've seen in a while.
Example 1
Example 2
AOL has been fighting for years to keep other IM cilent makers off their network. Amazing what a shrinking user base will do for a company.
I'm a big tall mofo.
It's not Open Source and it is Windows only, but the freeware version supports lots of things (like AIM file transfers) that kept my friends with AIM instead of gaim long after I had switched.
Oops, too late: a default install currently includes viewpoint, weatherbug, and ezula.
Take the 90-Day Challenge! http://rwmurker.bodybyvi.com/
You mean like Jabber? ;)
I've been trying to get to their development stuff for the last several weeks. Many of their source projects are currently shut off due to a break-in. I'm especially interested in documentation for libjabberoo.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
If you read carefully the EULA of the AIM client, it clearly says:
"You waive any right to privacy."
Nevermind the privacy statement on its own web page. The EULA says it clearly. You waive any right to privacy when using AIM.
Check for yourself.
What would have been great is if AOL released the specs for OSCAR, AND provided hooks to the protocol to allow various feature extensions. This will never happen, as once OSCAR is opened, there will be a barrage of third party AIM clients that do not show ads.
Even now, is very easy to develope an application to track the online status of AIM/iChat users, using, for example Net::AIM, NET::TOC and other modules.
Big deal.
http://www.rayn.net . Funny. Stuff.
offline messaging = using IM for all your communications and not switching identities between IM and e-mail
Send offline messages on AIM with DoorManBot
I only use AIM when those I want to chat with can't or won't use ICQ, which unfortunately is most of them. Thankfully, I don't have to use AIM to do it anymore. I use Trillian and it works just fine w/ AIM. And I can use my ICQ and Yahoo Messenger accounts.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
They did, however, drop "AOL" from their name and changed their stock ticker symbol from "AOL" to "TWX" when they realized that a major media corporation being bought up by an internet provider that spent more money sending CDs to every person on the planet than it will ever make selling internet services was really, really, stupid.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Man oh man, I hear you. I've been in charge of the design of the AIM plugin framework, and while I think we are going to have some real good stuff there, I'm also really trying to get us to dial back on the bundled crap - I think it really turns off developers to install something that drops lots of other stuff on your machine.
But we're going to have a nice platform, with web services, SIP gateways, client plug-ins, and a client SDK; there's different levels of intergration depending on what you're trying to do. I just hope that the clever developers out there look at this as an opportunity to build something that millions of people could be using, and aren't put off by prejudice against AIM/AOL.
Anyway - if you want us to "do it right", I'd appreciate it if you would let us know what you would like to see! Email me at juberti [aol.com], or post to my [new] blog on this topic. http://journals.aol.com/juberti/runningman
Maybe AOL is feeling the heat from alternatives such as Gaim and Adium.
You must be kidding! I mean Gaim is great and all, but AOL and AIM have at least 4 orders of magnitude more users than Gaim and Adium combined. I doubt they're feeling a great deal of heat.
The next version of iChat AV, Apple's IM/Video Conferencing Application will feature XMPP/Jabber Interoperability. They have been using it for iChat to iChat communications for a while and now have fully implemented the standard and are opening up to 3rd party implementations.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/ichat.html
The upcoming iChat AV server also supports 3rd party XMPP/Jabber clients:
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/tiger/
IM Spam, or "SpIM" already exists. As it is AOL has done a decent job with their network of limitting spim's efficiency. Unfortunately, they do this at the cost of more useful automated services.
Send offline messages on AIM with DoorManBot
Bzzzztt....
Sorry, thank you for playing.
You only need huge great servers if you think like AOL and wish to control everything. If you use protocols like XMPP (e.g. like Jabber) then you can have decentralised small servers very similar to how email works. That way you have much greater scalability and openess.
I have created a 'subscription' to those other users by adding them to my contact list. So whenever I logon, my jabber server contacts the other servers for that user's online status. Since the other user has also agreed to presence information, I'm notified whenever they change status, and my server notifies them. For messages, I contact my server, my server contacts the other user's server, and that goes to the other client.
Check it out. Wikipedia has a good article.
"Joy is contagious," he said, peering into the microscope.
This is entirely incorrect. When you connect to an XMPP server, you have a username@thatserver.tld. If you want to talk to foo@bar.net, thatserver.tld queries bar.net for presence information. It works just like email does.
I don't believe that Jabber has ever not had that feature.
-twb