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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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