ReadWriteWeb

A story that ran this weekend in the NY Times about how students are getting around outright Facebook network blocks at school caught my attention. As kids prepare to return to their classrooms, it might be a good moment to reconsider whether such blocks are truly effective.

Yes, the notion of proxy servers has been around almost as long as the Web itself, and students can easily find the location of dozens of these services that are used to circumvent Facebook (and other objectionable content). It takes about a minute to type in a Google search and load up your URL in their handy forms and off you go, block or no block. Certainly, some network admins are more diligent about blocking these proxy sites, but given the number of them, it is a losing battle.

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.

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.

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.