Archive - 2006

I have seen complaints by some people (in blogs, etc.) about the size of the standard AIM client. I don't have any problem with this myself, and I really doubt that the people who complain are doing so because their systems don't have enough memory to run the standard AIM. I think it's more a matter of principle for these people: they'd like a simple task to be performed (instant messaging), so they'd like to be able to run a small application to accomplish that.

Enter AIM Lite, Version 0.31 of which was released earlier this month. AIM Lite is beta software, and you won't find it at present on the AIM.com site. While AIM Lite may not satisfy everyone who wants a lighter IM client, from poking around the Internet it's clear that it already has an enthusiastic following.

Here are some interesting recent posts from blogs I follow. Many of the bloggers suggest they're closing up shop until after the new year, so I thought now would be a good time to guide readers to some of the more interesting, useful, and informative posts (before the readers, too, go on holiday break)...

AOL-specific topics

"AIM Lite version 0.31" [aimInfo]: news about the latest AIM Lite release, which includes more robust plugin and theming support, many other enhancements, and a few bug fixes.

I've mentioned previously that IM seems to me to have a place in business. It turns out that I'm not the only one thinking this way. The technology market research firm Radicati Group was quoted in eWeek in February 2006 as stating that more than 85% of businesses use instant messaging for professional communications, and they send more than 1 billion messages each business day.

Radicati's web site states that in a recent survey "87% of respondants indicated that they use IM at work." The group is forecasting a more than 50% increase in worldwide IM accounts, to 1.5 billion accounts, by 2010. That's a lot of people getting connected using instant messaging!

Kevin Farnham's blog has been moved. You can find all the old and many new entries at http://dev.aol.com/blog/1110.

As I look more closely at AOL Instant Messenger and the extensions AOL is building around and integrating with the core AIM functionality, it looks to me like AOL is creating a system that is very much in tune with Web 2.0 and social networks, but which in ways leaps beyond sites like MySpace and many other social networks. In logging into the newest versions of AIM, you are potentially logging into both a web of information centered on your own interests and a network that instantly tells you what's happening with your social (and professional?) contacts.

The AIM screen name as single sign-on

I've come to think of AIM screen names as akin to the single sign-on concept that is much discussed in distributed software environments where security and authorization are critical. When you log into AIM, or when I use my screen name, you have at your fingertips an array of interconnected services that can be applied to help coordinate your online presence.

Today's readings seem all to be about change. I read:

• "AOL Follows Through on Layoffs": 25% of the world-wide work force laid off, as previously announced (WSJ.com)
• "Google Tests New Ad Offerings--but will Advertisers Follow?: Google broadens its offerings (Wall Street Journal)
• "The De-Portalization of the Internet": aka What I Would Do If I Were Running Yahoo!, in the blog A VC

Yep, the world changes

I have often advised young people to be very careful as they select their course of study in college, to make sure they don't select a career that is prominent in the present era but is not likely to be prominent in the future. I use cowboys as an example. Despite hundreds of movies and many television shows that were made with the American cowboy as the central characters, the actual career of "cowboy" only existed for about 30 years. Cattle drives took place only for a few decades. Once the railroads came through, the land was carved into fenced ranches, and cowboy of "wild west" fame became just a farmhand.

If you've every used MySpace chat, then you already know something about Userplane's Webchat application. What you may not know is that any site can offer Webchat to its members and visitors with minimal effort, at no cost.

Webchat overview

Here's how Userplane introduces Webchat:

Userplane Webchat is truly the next step in chat software—beyond generic and ubiquitous chat rooms, Userplane Webchat is a feature-rich, multi-lingual, solidly-built, and easily-integrated Flash App that enables real-time text messaging and streaming audio/video communication for any website. Leveraging Macromedia’s robust Flash Communication Server technology, Webchat enables community, dating, corporate and collaborative websites to rapidly deploy a scalable, centrally-hosted a/v chat room for their users.

I've downloaded and browsed Open AIM, but I haven't yet tried to make my own application using the SDK. While browsing various AOL blogs that I subscribe to, I noticed two posts that piqued my curiosity.

AIM SDK Version 1.2.3 release

The first post, titled "Open AIM 1.2", appeared on gregsblog's aimInfo blog. This post talks about last week's release of Open AIM 1.2.1 and 1.2.3:

Ever since I put this blog's feed into my kevinfarnham1 AIM Page, using the "feeds" module (see my post AIM Pages, MySpace, Blogs, Feeds, Modules for the details), I've been curious about how modules actually work, and how one goes about creating them.

Web page source module view

Selecting "View Page Source" as I was on my AIM Pages profile page provided a bit of insight. The blog feed section of my page looked like this:

When I viewed the page source, I found the following code that's related to the blog feed:

Boston MA
Mashup Camp is where developers get together and share ideas and talk about issues relating to web based integrations of web services in new and clever ways. Check out the official site here.