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

Re:Please god let them do it right

[RM6f9]

Oops, too late: a default install currently includes viewpoint, weatherbug, and ezula.

Re:Don't Forget Trillian

[myspys]

i had this problem

since upgrading to trillian 3 the problem has vanished

have you tried trillian _3_?

not open protocols

[Anonymouse Cownerd]

This does not mean that AOL is releasing specs on their OSCAR protocol, which would have been great. AIM, iChat, and ICQ run on OSCAR. OSCAR is proprietary and will continue to be proprietary. If AOL can extend OSCAR for Apple for the purpose of video chatting, they can easily extend OSCAR for other features. TOC is AOL's string based open source protocol - a subset of OSCAR. TOC is free but is limited in features.

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.

Re:Cleary a response

[geoffspear]

They didn't.

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.

Re:Please god let them do it right

[juberti]

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

Re:Why No Standard?

[cuijian]

There is an IETF standard, XMPP. And as it is rather extensible, I'm sure it can do whatever AOL thinks they want to make their protocol do.

The problem is, other than Jabber, nobody (AFAIK) has implemented it.

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/