One thing I've been pushing for at AOL since I got here almost a year ago (wow, has it been that long?!??!) is a light version of AIM. Ted Leonsis, Jim Bankoff, and Jon Miller and I have had countless discussions about the issue and we've made huge progress.... this is really the future of AOL: light, fast, free products that compliment our bigger, more feature-rich products.

Elite folks don't want all the features in our mass market products--we know that.

Now that we're 1,000% focused on being an audience-based business (as opposed to an *access* business) there is no debate anymore. We have to make light, fast products for the A-listers. AOL has been a brand has been for the mass market, and it will still be, but we're ALSO going to have products for the elite users. Netscape, Light AIM, XDRIVE, and Weblogs, Inc's blogs are for elite users (as well as the mass market).

Over at the Greehouse they are now playing with "Light AIM" or "AIM Light" --or whatever we wind up calling this bad boy. I've had it for a while and it ROCKS. If your mom is on a three year old machine and the new feature-rich AIM Client is grinding her machine to a halt (not our fault!) go download AIM ES here: http://greenhouse.aol.com/prod.jsp?prod_id=27

AIM Light has no ads, no VOIP, no file-transfer, and a TINY footprint... in fact, I think it is the lightest IM client you run on your machine. This is something you could run on OLPC level machine (yes, I know it's a Windows product right now, but you get the idea).

Drop everything and go play with it... this is the future of AOL: light, open, cutting-edge, and elite AS WELL AS mass market.

Jim Bankoff and I discussed this RSS/buddy list feature at an internal meeting a while ago.... Stowe shows it off, so I guess it's working now. Very, very cool...

Site-based mail is really taking off on Netscape.

Andy created a slick new feature that puts a temporary alert on the top page of you site (a la Flickr alerts, which I've always loved) when you get a new message. The note closes after you check the message or click the close link.

Update: My pal Sean Bonner rips on MySpace for page goosing nonsense.
Update2: Make sure you go vote this story on digg! http://digg.com/tech_news/Netscape_Adds_in_Site_Mail

A very large percentage of MySpace traffic comes from the fact that they have site mail. Many young people I talk to don't use IM any more, they use the slow and ugly version: MySpace site mail. It's crazy because doing IM on a web page is slow, requiring multiple page loads. However, there is an advantage to it: you don't need to add anyone to your IM client and you don't need to download a client.

Anyway, the people have spoken and a large percentage of them love site-based mail/IM.

We've added it to the top-level of Netscape today (we've been testing it a couple of layers down since the start).

If you go to a story page (permalink page) you will see "Send Message" next to people's names now (see images below). We have this for both the person who submitted the story and for the people who are commenting.

Also, instead of taking you to another page it pops open a nice little AJAX box so we don't waste your time. We could have made this take 3-4 pages like MySpace does, but we decided to give up the page views in exchange for the user experience. I hate the fact that MySpace makes you load 3-4 pages to get to your mail--it's so obvious that they are goosing the page views. This is always a bad idea, because those folks click through the pages super fact and never look--let alone click--on the advertisements. This makes your advertisers upset because they think your site doesn't perform. It's a horrible design philosophy.

What do you guys think? Kind of slick huh?

From Mitch, who comment on my AIM Light thread:

I would *LOVE* an AIM Light. Something with the barebones
IM features (no games, news, stocks, etc..)

I would also love to have offline messaging (like Yahoo
Messenger), but I guess this is not the place to ask for that.

Posted at 8:38AM on May 12th 2006 by mitch 0 stars

Response from Jason:

I think we (AOL) should put AIM Light in the download pack with AIM Triton. So, when you go to the folder in your Start Menu you would have it there. People with slow computers or who need all their memory for other apps could load AIM Light most of the time, and some times load the larger, more feature-rich, Triton version. So, if you're running AIM Light and someone tries to hit you up for a video or audio chat you would get a message that says "JasonCalacanis is trying to start a video chat with you. In order to engage the video chat you need to Launch AIM Triton."

[ Note: I stole the comment of the day concept from Fred. ]

-----------------------
Second Place: Brian Breslin (on same post/topic).

Jason,

I think I'd pay $1/month or so for a LITE aim client which
didn't crash my computer, let me dock, and had decent
message handling. I have NEVER willingly clicked on
an ad in AIM, so i'm sure you guys would get more
revenue out of me at least.

Posted at 11:31AM on May 12th 2006 by 0 stars

This is kind of crazy: AIM6 takes up 171meg of my computer's memory while Yahoo Pager takes up just 10% of that amount. I love all the new features in AIM, but it is waaaaaaaaayyyyy to fat. All my friends tell me it slows down their machines and they are pissed off about it--I think they're right.

Now, some folks love the features and don't care about the memory footprint or how long it takes to load (like 10x as long as the old AOL Messenger 5.9 which you can get here), but I think most people do. My suggestion is we make AIM Light.... the light version of AIM. Have it come in at like 10k or something.

I'll keep you posted to my progress--people seem very open to the discussion so far.

The AIMPages beta is getting a lot of good feedback. I'm not involved in AIMPages directly at AOL, but my partner in crime Jim Bankoff is running it with a really tight team.

The best part of this is that some folks are realizing that we've created the most open service ever by one of the big five (Google, AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Fox Interactive).

More here: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/aim_pages_aol_b.php

I wonder if/when MySpace is going to put an "add YouTube/Flickr/Delicious/AOL Photos/etc" module into their page designer??!?!?

Mad props to my peeps for keep this very open....

Ted breaks down the "AOL launching MySpace killer" meme perfectly. We're not killing MySpace, we're opening up our services and enabling the original buddy system: the AIM buddy list!

In our industry one service rarely kills another: GMAIL didn't kill Hotmail, Yahoo IM didn't kill AIM, Google Finance hasn't killed Yahoo Finance, etc, etc, etc. In fact, as time goes on the success of web services becomes more and more based on interoperability, not annihilation. Why shouldn't users be able to use AIM for IM, GMAIL for email, MySpace for their personal page, Blogsmith for their blog, Linked in for business networking, and Finance.Yahoo.com if they like? That's what I do!

[ Editor's Note: Ironically, while all this AOL vs. MySpace stuff was brewing I was having drinks with Chris DeWolf, the co-founder of MySpace. ]

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!

Sean Bonnor points to some thought by Wil on AIM Bots and the costs associated with them.

I'm gonna look into this guys. We had our Engadget and Cinematical bots get turned off for doing too many IMs during CES and Sundance... we had to call to get them unblocked and we're part of the same company! I think the issue has to do with all the spammer trying to get into the AIM space.