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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."
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. Ever so slowly, but ever so surely, it is sinking in that there is no longer any point to having your own "gated community" when everybody just has an account on all of the services and uses a multi-network IM client that still doesn't show your commercials.
If AOL chooses to release something other than XMPP that tries to solve the same problems, only in AOL's way, developers should shun the new protocol and insist that AOL implement the standard instead of creating their own. Things that can connect to XMPP exist today. Nothing today exists that can use Tomorrow's Yet Another Proprietary AOL Protocol.
Until this occurs, it still won't have fully sunk in. IM is commoditizing. Actually, it's already a commodity, and only by artificially locking up the market have the large networks made it even this far, and that is an unnatural, unstable accomplishment that will inevitably break down, not something to build a business on.