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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.
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?
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.
AOL still has a butt load of clueless subscribers, and AIM is the only IM they know anything about....
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
Now you understand why they're doing this, young padawan.
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
They can't force a client to display ads. They can request it, and a client can even pretend to do so, but there's no way they can force a third party to display ads they don't want to.
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.
Well, for one, who uses a Microsoft service? Yahoo? Blah. And as for ICQ, everyone left that for AIM. Which doesn't matter now because AOL owns ICQ anyway.
Culture is more than commerce
I think it might be a geographic thing? Because everyone I know uses AIM. When you say IM name or anything like that its understood your talking about AIM.
Because of the Telmex monopoly, everyone in Mexico was introduced to instant messaging via MSN messenger... and now, due to the sheer number of MSN users here, it is not worth it to use another service.
Of all my IM-using acquaintances, only one guy uses another service (yahoo), everyone else is in MSN.
No sig for the moment.
I can't imagine how AIM or MSN are nearly as useful as Yahoo or ICQ - you can't leave an offline message for someone to get when they log on next. If they're not on, you can't talk to them. (It's possible both have fixed this fairly recently but it wasn't the case when I checked last, and even if it IS fixed, it was about a decade after the other two services had offlines - what took so damn long? I was sending offline messages to ICQ buddies in 1998.)
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.
I don't use MSN, but AIM lets you stay signed in 24/7 via texts to phone. It's not an "off line message" (obviously better), but I know not everyone has unlimited texting, so not everyone uses that feature.
Evolution is a state-sponsored, state-protected religion.
Can anyone see whether the voice & video protocols are documented. I couldn't see anything at first glance.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
It's called email. Remember that?
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.
Pidgin (and gaim) have had this feature for years, and it's protocol-independent.
Its = possessive. It's = "it is"
Not really. Rather - they let you set a 'pounce' which requires that you have your client logged in and connected when the user reconnects...
Uh, I'm pretty sure they can force you to stop distribution of your application if you link against their library and aren't following their restrictions. It would be violating the license, and is just as bad as someone linking GPL code into their proprietary applications.
Phil
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.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
You know, you don't have to type short phrases, but doing so means that the other person in the conversation will be able to respond more quickly, once you've completed your thought.
If I could rearrange the keyboard, I'd put U and I together.
Which seems to be how skype does it too. Unless they've changed it and I didn't notice.
ICQ is still very popular in some parts of the world. Here in Germany I really don't know ANYONE who uses AIM, MSN or Yahoo. Everyone is on ICQ.
UPnP wouldn't hurt either. To this day, I can't get video to work on AIM no matter what I do.
I know I don't have to, but the medium naturally guides this type of communications, IMO. It isn't as good as email or snail-mail letters for long thoughtful communications, thus it is generally relegated to quick, burst-like, stream-of-thought communications.
I'm really becoming a fan of the McLuhan "the medium is the message" theory, as I get older. The structure of the medium itself generally guides most likely form that the thought communicated can take. The best example is SMS, which I avoid like the plague, can you picture saying anything of content (outside of quick updates) to someone through formats like this? IM protocols are slightly better, but still are rather "bursty", even if not limited by input methods to the extent of SMS (how many IM programs treat "enter" as a break by default?).
I'd say a quicky hierarchy of information transfer (from highest bandwidth to lowest) would be:
Book/Essay
Lecture
Letter/Email
In person conversation
telephone conversation (lack of non-verbal context)
IM
and lowest being SMS
I know you CAN talk at length in IM, but it is generally not used that way, nor expected to be used that way, since other "instant" technologies do it better.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
I agree that SMS and even, to an extent, hinders long, thoughtful statements and responses. I also agree that as far as bandwidth goes, your hierarchy is pretty much correct. However, I think that raw bandwidth isn't what we're looking for in IM. Also, a book takes a whole lot of time to write, and a tiny fraction of that time to read, meaning that once it is written, it can be a very quick way of getting information to a lot of people, but the actual writing process means that that same information could likely be conveyed to a single person or small group of people much quicker.
Also, a book is only a one-way communication, and IM is rarely used for that. A Lecture could be a two-way communication (via questions and answers) but remains a largely one-way communication system.
I'd put an in-person conversation above email or letters, since for letters/emails, the message has to be written in full, which is slower than speaking, then sent, then read in full, which is faster than listening. For in-person conversation, the sending and receiving is simultaneous, and at the speed of speech, which is, on average, 225 wpm, I believe. You're unlikely to find a typist above 120 wpm, but they are around. (Probably more, here, since we're all into computers).
Telephone communication still goes above email, for the same reason, but under in-person conversation. Also, voice carries some information that the words spoken do not (largely emotional indicators).
The advantage of IM that I see that from time of message sent to message received is second only to voice/in-person communication. The reason people use IM, though, is that it can be backgrounded much more easily than a voice-conversation. Additionally, one can have several independent conversations over IM, but only one at a time with almost every other medium. (You can write multiple letters at a time, I guess, but that's not as normal, I think.) The fact that it encourages small messages is, in my eyes, an indication that it is the closest to a text-based form of a voice conversation. Sure, it's possible to read a book faster, or to listen to someone talk faster, but is it reasonable to read 5 books or listen to 5 people speak at the same time? That same task can be easily accomplished with IM. But yeah, as you say, it doesn't necessarily work for long thoughts as well.
As far as SMS goes, well. It's easily accessible nearly anywhere, but that's about all it's got going for it. Oh well. My phone has no qwerty keyboard, so I can type a message at maybe 4 or 5 wpm. Oh well.
If I could rearrange the keyboard, I'd put U and I together.
Very true. Sorry, I really didn't know what offline messaging was. =\
Its = possessive. It's = "it is"
Book/Essay
Lecture
Letter/Email
In person conversation
telephone conversation (lack of non-verbal context)
IM
and lowest being SMS
I think you have IM and SMS the wrong way round in that list, I (and many people I know) write out and even punctuate SMS messages, but will resort to acronyms in IM. When was the last time you used "brb" (for example) in a SMS? However if I get distracted whilst on IM I'll use it without thinking.
Your list was also missing IRC; I think that would probably go above IM and SMS.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
Why is parent modded funny and not insightful? It's fairly true. While AOL's service itself is dying, those that do use it heavily and rely on it don't know much about computers or alternatives to services and programs. Also there's still a large existing userbase for AIM that makes it get larger.
Also, if everybody DID move to Y!M, do you think Microsoft would have tried to buy them last month? And while there's a lot of hotmail users, I know very very few folks who use MSN Messenger right now. So no, I think it would appear that people don't "move on", they just adapt to other IM clients as well.
Also, to the grandparent: who the heck moves _ON_ to ICQ? It was good way back, but there's several flaws.
- You have to remember your number (I know mine, but these days, if I got one it'd be probably way too long)
- Because it's a number it's way more prone to spamming via brute force
- The official client has been a bloated POS longer than most other clients. Even the "lite" version became bloated. Mostly happened when AOL bought them, but it was WORSE than AOL's AIM client at one point IMO.
I can't remember the last time somebody gave me their ICQ number.
Pancakes. Oh I blew it.
In general, AIM is the main protocol used in the US. MSN is generally more popular everywhere else. However, Israel is split between MSN and ICQ (I'm not sure if that has changed recently though). The only people I've seen with Yahoo are those who have the ISP and don't really talk to anyone unless it's needed.
~ Mooga
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.
I think you have IM and SMS the wrong way round in that list, I (and many people I know) write out and even punctuate SMS messages, but will resort to acronyms in IM.
I think you're the odd ones there. Do you and your friends happen to have phones with qwerty keyboards? Abbrievations on IM are due to lazy. But using them over SMS is due to typing text on a number pad sucking majorly.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
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).
The official AIM client can send off-line IMs now (the server holds them until the recipient is online). Pidgin can receive them, but as far as I know it can not send them.
Probably depends on region. I'm in Germany and I've never knowingly met anyone who actually uses AIM. I assumed that the service was essentially dead, ICQ being much more popular.
Overall, from my experience most people appear to be using ICQ with some using MSN. Jabber (including GTalk) is used only by the tech-savvy, AIM and YIM have zero apparent market share.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
yea, they let their legal dogs slip to get Gaim to change its name to pidgin.
Support for AIM Offline Messages was added in Pidgin 2.4.0, released February 29, 2008: http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/ChangeLog
End of Line.
I'm envious of people who can actually use that feature. On mobile phones I rarely manage to do more than 1-3 WPM, whether the phone tries to be helpful or not. Usually more with T9 turned off.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
In general, MSN seems dominant in Latin America(Except Brazil, I see a lot of G-talk there), Western Europe(At least England, Germany, Italy, and France), and the Middle East. Can anyone vouch for East Asia and Eastern Europe? [Or, God forbid, know any real statistics?]
Yes, but do this on a large enough scale with a popular application, and eventually someone from AOL will download a copy and notice, and revoke your key or do whatever it takes to destroy your app because it doesn't follow their TOS.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
Your list was also missing IRC; I think that would probably go above IM and SMS
Your probably right on that one, though in its hey-day I would have put it with IM. This is mostly due to the increasing maturity of people left on IRC. Earlier it's signal-to-noise ration was almost as bad a AOL or Yahoo chat rooms, and still is in more bot heavy channels.
I think you have IM and SMS the wrong way round in that list, I (and many people I know) write out and even punctuate SMS messages, but will resort to acronyms in IM. When was the last time you used "brb" (for example) in a SMS? However if I get distracted whilst on IM I'll use it without thinking.
I think your an exception on that. I have seen far more "wat r u up 2" type language via mobile phones, than in IM, thanks to the painful little keyboards (if they have even that). It takes me 45 minutes to type my address on those things. I'm sure more business context, "smart phone" users generally exceed this low standard quite a bit, though. Age, education, and keyboards, seem to increase the content by a good degree, but on average it is more impoverished than IM.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Wondering a bit off topic here, but what the hell. My standard takes the assumption that too much interaction isn't a good thing when talking about weighty, or detailed, subjects. For communications-for-communications sake I would agree with you completely, I'd rather chat with friends in person than text any day. Taking this discussion that we're having right now, for example, I'd rather be doing it via a forum (as we are) or email than at a local pub. When writing you have the ability to focus more on arguments and structure, you can sit and stare at what you write and edit it for clarity, and remove erroneous arguments. Long-text formats allow you to convey more complex arguments and thoughts. In conversation these generally get removed by the interplay, the interplay also leads to more distractions and tangents. This is why I put lecture so high, since it is a guided form of communications.
I guess I used "bandwidth" in a more metaphorical sense, in the literal I think your probably right in you assessment, though.
Most of this is subjective, of course, it just seems the lower on my totem pole of communications you go, the less content can be expressed. If the medium is too immediate you don't think enough, if its too slow you run into the issues you mentioned with books.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
AIM does have this, but pidgin (and probably others) don't support sending them yet. Pidgin makes up for it with a plug in though.
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread I think that Predictive text technology means that the number of people who use "text speak" is over estimated, at least amongst my peer group in the UK. I know that many teens still use it, but I think that most educated 20-somethings* and upwards, have stopped in favour getting a clear message across just as quickly.
Interestingly my dad *tries* to use text speak whereas my brother, 8 years younger than me, uses normal speak. I know it's only anecdotal evidence but it's (along with incomprehensible IMs from teenage cousins)is what leads me to believe that use of "text speak" is more a perception than reality.
*this is my peer group.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me