The AOL APIs: Userplane

Userplane is unique among the AOL APIs in that it is a ready-made set of tools that online communities can easily integrate into their site with almost no programming required. For example, Ron Miller's recent article "Online Dating Site Finds a Match with Userplane IM" describes how the world's largest online dating site, PlentyofFish.com, applied Userplane's Webchat as its instant messaging solution, with very little effort, and with a highly favorable outcome.

Userplane is a relatively new member of the AOL community, having been purchased by AOL in the summer of 2006. One of the key strengths of Userplane -- a strength that made it a natural for inclusion in the AOL sphere -- is its highly scaled infrastructure. I first saw the word "userplane" when I was exploring MySpace.com in early 2006. As pages loaded I would often see "userplane" within the URLs that were loading to complete MySpace pages.

Later, I realized that MySpace's chat rooms are actually an almost unchanged instantiation of Userplane's chat application. MySpace is a rather busy site, no? And Userplane, a pretty small company / division of AOL, was selected to provide MySpace's chat capability, and has evidently handled the user load with not much problem. For example, I've never gotten the "Unexpected error" messages that are so prevalent on MySpace (usually due to SQL Server problems, from what I've read) when I was visiting MySpace chat. Not that I've spent all that much time in the chat area, but I did have to spend a reasonable amount of time there while my wife and I were writing our MySpace guide for teens and parents in early 2006.

Userplane's customer base includes a lot of online communities, including dating sites like and Date.com; social networking sites like friendster.com and MySpace.com; and corporations like Honda and RedBull.com.

Resources

The Userplane site has a lot of information about the Userplane application suite, and you can download and try out many of the applications for free. A search for "Userplane" on dev.aol.com will bring up Ron's article and many blog posts I made regarding Userplane.

I've liked Userplane ever since I first investigated it, shortly after hearing its founder, Michael Jones, speak at last November's Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. To me, Userplane seems like a microcosm of what AOL is becoming: a provider of flexible, customizable, fully scaled infrastructure, for developers and startups.

-- Kevin Farnham
O'Reilly Media