Your buddy list is gonna be everywhere... or at least anywhere a developer can think of putting it. Can't wait to see how the street plays with this stuff. Fred likes the move, and he thinks we should take it a step further and open up the AIM platform (I happen to agree with that). Fred breaks it down: "IM is like email. It's a basic and fundamental communication tool and it needs to be pervasive and interoperable. Nobody wants to have three or four IM clients, but we all do. Or we use Trillian (that's what I do) which takes the consumer away from the AIM brand."
Exactly Fred... we can open up AIM or people will hack into it with Trillian and take away the Weclome screen and ad-unit inside of AIM. I'm gonna start tracking down this issue inside of AOL.
A nice analysis of the move. Rafat's take: "AOL's learning fast." We're trying!
1. Personally, I use gaim (gaim.sourceforge.net) because it's open source and multi-platform compatible, but I welcome anything that adds a new open standard to IM. As is said above, it's like email; can you imagine not being able to email a friend because he's on a different "email network"?
Posted at 2:02PM on Mar 7th 2006 by Michael G. Richard