AIM - ReadWriteWeb

Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login

Mike Melanson — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 08:25:00 -0800

Facebook and AOL announced last night a partnership that will integrate a user's Facebook friends into their AOL Instant Messenger. The announcement came on a day when Google announced its new attempt at capturing your social attention with Google Buzz and Yahoo! reminded us from the outskirts that they've been at this game for a year now.

According to Mercury News, about 70% of AOL users also use Facebook and the move is a sign of where AOL is heading, but we wonder if it isn't more a sign of where Facebook is heading and has been all along.]]> The partnership will use Facebook Connect to import a user's Facebook friends into their AIM contacts, enabling chat directly between the two services. This will allow AIM's 17 million users to continue using AIM while being able to keep in touch with their existing friends on AIM.

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The Great Migrations

If you think back to 2002, the big news was Friendster. For many of us, it was the first time we'd joined a social network and we went wild adding friends. Then, in 2003, Myspace came along and we slowly started adding these same friends on Myspace until one day the virtual cobwebs became too much and we left Friendster altogether. And then came Facebook and we did it again.

Let's face it - if we can avoid it, we'd rather not do this again and that's precisely what Facebook wants. Facebook has already become the dominant platform for social networking, but as it expands its business in other directions, we will begin to see it pull users away from other businesses too. This partnership is not only about preventing that, but further solidifying Facebook's place as our one, true login.

The more integrated Facebook becomes, the less willing we'll be to recreate that same web of social connections we've reinvented time and again.

While many of us may complain about Facebook's on-site chat breaking down, being slow or crashing our browsers, the fact remains that Facebook is where we've based our online social life and chat is a basic extension of this. AIM used to be one of the industry standards in this realm, but now it looks more like the company is hedging its bets and trying not to fall prey to the same circumstances that caused us to abandon other platforms.

Your One True Login

As we wrote last month, users already prefer to use Facebook Connect by a margin of 2-to-1 and countless sites already let you make connections on their site by comparing their user base with your Facebook friends.

In this case, however, it isn't the connections that are being imported - real-time interaction with an external user base is being imported. Whether or not a particular friend has an account with AOL is irrelevant. The partnership reinforces the idea that our Facebook profile is at the center of our online existence. Whether or not someone is signed into AOL is no longer what's at stake here, it's whether or not the user is logged into Facebook.

While other integrations attempt to replicate our social connections, to port them over to the site we're on, this one makes no such demands. We can continue using AIM while taking advantage of the particular friend set we've likely spent the most time cultivating and grooming - our Facebook friends.

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AIM Debuts Lifestream Twitter Client

Dana Oshiro — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 11:33:37 -0800

AOL just announced AIM Lifestream. The service allows AIM users to check and update their Facebook, Twitter and AIM lifestreams from an AIM mobile and desktop dashboard. Users can send SMS and IM messages directly from the desktop and connect with friends across multiple platforms and using multiple mediums.

]]> While this may appear to be a basic life streaming client for Twitter and Facebook, one of the great features of this service is the fact that it allows users to drag and drop images, URLs and text directly from the browser. While the company will be hard pressed to get users to switch from their loyal desktop lifestreaming clients, this drag and drop functionality may be the best case to switch. The service is available by downloading AIM 7. As announced at today's TechCrunch 50 Conference, the Lifestream iPhone app is currently in the App Store approval process and will be available shortly.

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AOL Announces Revenue Sharing for Open AIM

Josh Catone — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 21:01:01 -0800

Last month we called AOL's Open AIM developer platform an "often over-looked social networking platform," but with 80 million users and plans to integrate the AOL Instant Messenger platform into bebo, it might not be over-looked for long -- in fact, it now has 295,000 developers signed up. AOL has been pushing their chat platform hard this year, last month giving out $100,000 for the best AIM-powered applications, and today sweeting the pot further by announcing the availability of AIM Money, a new revenue sharing program.

]]> The program was initially launched in March, and is now available to any Open AIM developer.

"Our goal is to facilitate the world's online, real-time conversations anytime and anywhere," said David Liu, Senior Vice President, AOL People Networks in a press release. "To that end, we're not only giving developers more opportunities and incentives to create meaningful instant messaging-based applications for our millions of users, but we're also bringing more requested features and innovation to the AIM platform to satisfy user needs."

Participating in AOL Money is free, and developers are required to include a display ad widget that runs alongside their web or software based AIM mashup. Payments are made monthly via PayPal. Ads are handled by AOL's "Platform A."

In addition to the wide release of AOL Money, the company is announcing a new version of the AIM software and a corresponding new release of the Open AIM API that takes advantage of the latest features of the client software. Perhaps the most compelling new feature for developers is the addition of "mini applications." Mini apps are widgets that run inside of the AIM client software and can be accessed by users from a bar at the base of their buddy list.

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AOL Announces Open AIM Dev Contest Winners

Josh Catone — Mon, 19 May 2008 07:48:17 -0800

AOL's Open AIM is an often over-looked social networking platform, mainly because instant messaging isn't thought of these days as a form of social networking. Perhaps, on its own, IM isn't social networking, but clearly it is an important feature -- both Facebook and MySpace have it, and AOL is planning to integrate its 80 million-strong AIM network into bebo as soon as possible. This week AOL announced the winners of its Open AIM developer competition. Below are the 9 winning applications that can improve your AIM experience.

]]> AOL ran its $100,000 competition through TopCoder, which we just mentioned in our guide to the crowdsourced workforce. Of note is that the top three applications in the OpenAIM contest came from the same user -- who took home $30,000 for his efforts. Perhaps a new hire for AOL?

IM Remote - Screen to screen desktop sharing over AIM.
IM Loud: This plugin reads IMs out loud to the user.
IM Whiteboard: Use AIM as a whiteboard and simultaneously draw with buddies.
LinkPreview: Thumbnail link previews when hovering over a link sent to you in chat.
Free2IM: Possibly one of the most useful applications in the entire bunch, Free2IM provides automatic, on-the-fly language translation back and forth over IM. That's something we had on our wish list last March when Google released its AJAX Language API.

Infomess: Chat and share videos at the same time.
Share-A-Map: Share and collaboratively edit MapQuest maps. Giving someone directions will never be the same...
PopsChat: Bound to score points with TopCoder users, this plugin brings AIM chat and features to the TopCoder Arena (a chat and messaging area).
FeedReader: An RSS feedreader for AIM.

You can view the entire list of eligible submissions on the competition page.

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