Wall Street Journal IM Ratings: AIM Is #1

Wednesday's edition of the Wall Street Journal had an article titled "Rating the New Instant-Messaging Programs" written by Katherine Boehret. The article compares AIM 6.0, Yahoo! Messenger 8.1, and Windows Live Messenger 8.1.

Does Version number really tell which software package is best?

Now, the first thing I think of, when I see that the Windows messenger version number exactly matches the Yahoo! messenger version number, is that eerie version number jump in the early Microsoft Word, where it suddenly leaped from Version 2.x to Version 6.0. I'm sure very few of you remember that. The point was that WordPerfect, which many people felt was the best word processing program at the time, was about to release Version 6.0. The Microsoft marketing team was apparently convinced that they might be losing sales if Word came out with a mere Version 3.0 after its 2.x series. I mean, don't we all select among competing software packages by looking at whichever one has the highest version number? That's surely a way to tell which is best, right?

It looks like that same marketing team is in charge of the Windows Live Messenger product today. Yes, Microsoft's instant messaging product has as high a Version number as any of it's competitors!

Fortunately, Katherine Boehret doesn't have the same opinion about how one should rate instant messaging products. She even took a close look at AIM 6.0, leading off her article with it, despite it's rather low Version number.

Good news for all, but AIM comes out on top!

Katherine is generally pleased with all of the new releases. She cites the ease of sharing digital files, the ability to make phone calls, and the capability for video chatting as being superb additions to today's instant messaging. But she favored AIM above the others, despite their elevated Version numbers.

In the end, AOL came out on top. It offers tabbed messaging, a neat way to organize numerous conversations into one window; and "notifications" or brief summaries of messages that appear on-screen when the chat window isn't opened.

AIM 6.0 simplifies everything, starting with the way your buddy list looks...

AIM's best feature gets going when you start chatting with more than one buddy at the same time. The left side of your chat window automatically turns into a list of tabs with buddy screen names in order of who messaged you first. If someone sends you an IM while you're chatting with someone else, a green exclamation point appears beside the sender's screen name. To swap from one buddy to the next, select a screen name on the left-hand side and type away.

The old method of IMing, still used by Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger, involves opening a different window for every conversation that you start. If you really miss this while using AIM, you can ungroup conversations from the tabbed window. But I found that tabbed IMs were an easier way to converse with multiple friends at once while also keeping my desktop tidy.

In other ways, AIM came out on top, or tied for the top spot, as well.

Right now, everyone can read Katherine's article online at "Rating the New Instant-Messaging Programs". Since the WSJ.com site is a subscription site, this article may not be freely available in the future.

Congratulations to the AIM Team!

Congratulations to the AOL AIM team! When a writer for an internationally-acclaimed consumer and business oriented paper like the Wall Street Journal ranks you first, you've accomplished something fantastic.

And my advice to developers, or startups, who want to embed instant messaging into their applications: the AIM Developer site should be your first stop. And it will probably be your only stop, given the richness offered by the OpenAIM API.

-- Kevin Farnham
O'Reilly Media