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.'"

Comments

Huh?

[TubeSteak]

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?

Required features

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

Can GPL-compatible software (or really any kind of open-source software) be written, given these restrictions?

Open AIM Additional Feature Requirements

Welcome 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

• Advertising
• Buddy Info
• Expressions and Buddy Icons
• AIM Start Page
• AIM Toolbar

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...

Re:Required features

[gparent]

This is really not useful at all, then. Any decent application will have 100,000 users at a time, so this means we're getting advertising in Pidgin if they decide to implement it (I hope not). Self-Compile with stripped advertising, anyone?

Re:Restrictions

[MaizeMan]

Jeez. I was actually hopeful there for a sec. Thanks for pointing out this release is less (far less) than it appears.

Too late; they've added one too many AIM bot

[greed]

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.

Re:Restrictions

[bkaul01]

I wonder how they define "multi-headed applications"

In any case, third-party developers such as Cerulean Studios (Trillian) already apparently know the OSCAR protocol well enough to have incorporated additional functionality such as SecureIM (encrypted messages) that aren't included in standard AIM clients. This seems more geared towards encabling people to develop small-time add-ons or perhaps bloated adware clients than to actually increasing the quality of mainstream clients.

Re:Restrictions

[TheRaven64]

It seems poorly worded, but I think they do not want to allow bridging. For example, Microsoft could create a server-side bridge to AIM and put a box in the next version of MSNM for people to enter their AIM IDs. They would then see AIM users as MSN users, stop using the AIM client, and forget about the AOL brand. Currently, AIM is bridged with GTalk, and I presume AOL get a fair amount of money from Google because of it. I suspect that AOL have realised that IM standardisation is inevitable and that they can make more money selling their customers to other IM networks in the short-term, before they become just another IM provider in the same way that they are an email and web hosting provider.

Allowing people to connect to the network using other clients helps this strategy, since it means more people will actively use the network and they can charge higher fees for the bridges to GTalk, MSN, Y!IM and so on. Allowing people to build bridges with this would completely destroy their new business model.

Everyone find the loopholes.

[zdude255]

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.

Re:Well...

[bem]

Indeed, and I just spent this morning setting up an internal IM server for my employer, using the mysql database they use for their intranet server as the authentication (yay for one password) and it talks to googletalk just fine and dandy.

The hardest part was finding a package with the feature set I wanted (um, mysql authentication)

Now our employees can chat with each other in real time (double-secure... SSL connections and not going offsite) or with customers (still SSL, but have to trust their server).

If AOL was serious, they would just implement a Jabber gateway on their end.

Re:Well...

[nine-times]

I don't know if it's too late. AIM still has TONS of users. It's not clear to me how AOL intends to make money from AIM if people are using other clients without embedded ads, but I guess I don't really care either.

Gtalk is not all that open

[ivanjager]

"joins GTalk (Google's chat network) in offering unfettered access to all of the network's features to third-party applications and services."

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.

Re:Still around?

[Omestes]

I noticed that most of my European (mostly British) college friends used MSN, while most of the kids from the States used AIM, minus some of the younger kids who used Yahoo. The brits told me that no one they knew back home used AIM much, while at the same time I knew maybe 3 people in the States who used MSN. I think it is largely regional.

Thank god for AdiumX, made life so much better. It's one of those programs I miss dearly now that I'm using Windows, along with the various Omni products, and Quicksilver. Yes, I know there is Pigdin, and Miranda (or as I like to call it, the land usability forgot), but it's so goddamn ugly, it takes up 40% of my desktop, expandable, and unintuitive.

I pretty much gave up on IM as a useful form of communications though, it forces you into brief little "blurbs", and limits your thoughts and expressions to single statements, which is not inductive to thoughtful communications. Better than cellphone text messages, but still sub-optimal. Also it's just another distraction, putting me at the command of other people's communication needs, which is a habit I'm trying to get out of as much as practically possible.