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AOL Opens Up the AIM Instant Messaging Network
AVIDJockey writes "In a pleasantly surprising move, AOL has changed its tune when it comes to third-party access to the company's chat network. America Online has recently launched a service called OpenAIM 2.0, which provides open, uninhibited access to services like Meebo, or all-in-one IM clients like Pidgin, allowing them to freely and easily use the AIM instant messaging network. 'At the moment, multi-platform IM desktop clients like Pidgin or Adium (the popular Mac client) generally rely on hacking and reverse engineering access to chat networks run by AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft and others. Not only is that bad for developers since it means more work, it also means that such clients often can't use all the features of a particular network.'"
It might be my imagination, but GTalk (through the GMail interface) allows one to open an AIM connection. I wonder if it's related to this?
When politicians are involved, everyone loses.
Yeah, i'm not buying it.
Good news. Adium sometimes wouldn't work with iChat when it came to file transfers. Fixing that alone might actually get me using Adium.
I wonder if this paves the way to Adium working with iChat audio and video conferencing?
People still use AOL IM?
I thought everyone moved onto MSN/ICQ/Yahoo! ages ago...
This is good for business!
... well, if something is more useful, it will be more used! (in theory, anyways)
;)
Companies think that lock-in is good for business. And sure, it IS when you're dealing with tangible goods. But when dealing with interoperability concerns with software
At least AOL finally figured this out. I'm waiting for microsoft and apple (for all their software) to get a clue
I'm guessing I'll be modded down for saying this, but this seems more like they're trying to remain relevant by hopping on the "Open" bandwagon a little too late in the game. XMPP was the response to the closed nature of all of these IM networks, and not surprisingly, Google chose that very protocol for Google Talk. They even provided instructions on how to connect using clients _other_ than Google Talk.
AOL, on the other hand has always been quite hostile toward projects that made use of their network (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madster). Why would anyone want to develop for them now, just because they've stuck "Open" on AIM hoping that OSS developers take care of their coding for them?
I thought the money was in advertising, not in the network.
If they explicitly open up the network to 3rd party clients, what happens to their ad revenue?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
They are desperate to not lose any more market share to Yahoo, MSN and Google Talk (among others). Hopefully this will keep pressure on the others to open up their networks (except MSN of course) and embrace the fact that having many clients is too much hassle for people and all-in-ones make more sense
As a Pidgin user I welcome this move.
Make SELinux enforcing again!
where's the business plan? AOL is still a company. They gotta make money somehow...
I think they should do what Microsoft is doing and what Google is doing very well with their Google apps built in IM system which is to create a communications platform for businesses to allow for communication.
There's definitely a lot of room for profit but the first thing they gotta do is get some trust back. They lost quite a bit of it when they cashed out on their ISP customers.
We tried to make the Open AIM Program as restriction-free and flexible as possible. But in order to help protect our network and users, certain rules apply.
http://outcampaign.org/
Can GPL-compatible software (or really any kind of open-source software) be written, given these restrictions?
Open AIM Additional Feature RequirementsWelcome to Open AIM! If you intend to develop and distribute an AIM Custom Client (including mobile versions) or Web AIM Developer Application, you must pick 2 of the 5 options listed below and incorporate them into your Developer Applications. These options include
Just to be clear, these requirements don't apply to Plugins, Bots or the use of the Presence Indicators. Please note that if your application exceeds 100,000 peak simultaneous users, you must implement Advertising as described below as one of your two options.
Not sure what will work best for your application? Don't worry. You can always change your selections to suit your needs as you grow.
This is starting to look as if now that everyone knows the OSCAR protocol anyway, AOL is trying to make a power grab under the guise of openness...
http://outcampaign.org/
are there any features users can get by using AIM that aren't found in the Jabber/XMPP world, either via XEP or that you can find in existing Jabber clients?
MilkMiruku
Last night I fired up Adium and there was a new AIM bots entry with another one of their stupid bots.
So I don't care if the network is open. They have no provision for getting rid of these damn things permanently. I even tried logging on to the web dashboard thing and looking there. So forget 'em.
I only have an AIM account because of something I had on Netscape.com way back when for I forget why; it just never got deleted. I don't know anyone who only has AIM, so we'll all cope just fine without them.
As crappy as AOL is, at least they mention Linux support specifically in their FAQ. At least AIM had a Linux client, as crappy as it was before Gaim.
Culture is more than commerce
I for one will display the required advertisements from a menu item selected by the user. It's not my fault that users don't click it.
Jerk.
Can anyone see whether the voice & video protocols are documented. I couldn't see anything at first glance.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
just askin'
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Clearly whoever wrote that article hasn't looked at http://www.google.com/talk/otherclients.html. Specifically the "Voice calls to other Google Talk users" column.
Honestly, I'm not sure they haven't documented the protocol recently.
UPnP wouldn't hurt either. To this day, I can't get video to work on AIM no matter what I do.
They could include inline text ads with the IM content for non-AOL clients....
I feel no pity for these services (I don't call them 'networks', because they aren't networks; the internet is the network, they are merely services on the network). They are their own worst enemy. They all had dreams of locking in users and becoming 'ma bell', as it were, in the IM world. Instead, they created their own problem. . .
With three competing services where you cannot send and receive IM's, files, chats, etc with users of the other services, they created a situation where most users have multiple IM accounts on multiple services. So, now, since 3 of my friends use Yahoo, and some of my co-workers use MSN, and other people I communicate with use Google Talk, I ended up with 4 different IM service accounts. Since I have the accounts, there's no barrier at all between me switching back and forth between them. Plus, I have an incentive to find a third-party IM client which will allow me to use all the services transparently. This situation leads to actually *less* lock-in than if they interoperated.
If the services had agreed to interoperate long ago, say in the late 90's, then once a user used one service, they would have little reason to go join another service. Without an incentive to have multiple IM accounts, there's little incentive to go find third-party IM clients (well, except for using the IM services on platforms not supported by the 'official' client, such as Linux, Mac, BSD, Solaris).
I suspect that the main reason for the popularity of third-party clients like Trillian, Pidgin, etc has mostly to do with being able to use multiple services with one client. Some of it, of course, does go to, e.g. Linux users wanting to IM and the main clients providing no support, or people who just prefer to use a Free Software program.
But, if we look at the vast majority of the market, if AIM, Yahoo, and MSN interoperated, they would be able to get a relatively stable set of users who would be using the 'official' client with the ads, and thus a pretty secure revenue stream.
But, since they didn't interoperate, they created a situation where their services have, I think, LESS VALUE from the company's perspective. They only realize this, though, when they start losing market share.
My #1 Rule of business: Don't push your customers into your competitors' arms.
The most interesting part of this is that mobile usage (coding for mobile devices) is now okay with a separate agreement with AOL. When the first version of this initiative was launched, mobile device connectivity was not okay.
This might start turning up some interesting applications for cell phone usage, but it's doubtful that any old person could code an app for the majority of devices out there as the OEMs (motorola, nokia, LG, samsung, ericsson, etc etc) control what goes on their phones. It could be interesting on a windows mobile or iPhone platform (once the iPhone SDK is released).
yea, they let their legal dogs slip to get Gaim to change its name to pidgin.