A Year Ago Today....

While I never thought we would "change the world," the launch of Open AIM on March 6th, 2006 was a big deal at AOL.  Outside of Mapquest, and WinAmp, two products that many people do not realize actually are AOL properties, we were the first to have a full fledge API that developers could write to.  Since the launch a year ago, many other groups inside AOL have followed with their own API releases.  I think opening up AIM was a start to some massive changes to the way we think about software at AOL.  When Justin Uberti and I went to give the first Open AIM talk to AOL employees in our Mountain View offices in January of 2006, most were skeptical we would even get the API out the door.  Many said executives would block us from doing it.  By the time we actually released the code in March, developers we talked to at ETech and VON were so excited about having an official API that many of them did not know where to start.

In the year we have seen many custom clients, plugins, and bots make their into the community.  Here are a few notable Open AIM releases:

Custom Clients
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PCD Music Lounge by Doppelganger
AIM Pro by WebEx
Playlinc by SCI
IM Trader by PivotSolutions
LAIM by OpenAIM dev team

Plugins
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JAMS, later AIM Gadgets
Facebook Plugin
Mail Plugin
Location Plugin
AIM Music Link
AIM Logger Manager by Nalsoft
AMIP
Rx-Plugin
IM Control Panel
SideKlick

So what's next?  Well as I always say what fun is it if I spoil the surprise, but I can tell you we will see AIM on more devices in the near future as well as some great plugins all written using the Open AIM API.