AOL has officially AIM to third party instant messaging clients under an initiative called OpenAIM 2.0. There’s now a documented API that IM client writers can use to interface with AIM. Before, software developers reverse engineered the protocol used by the official AIM client and updated their software whenever AOL made changes that cut them off.
Hopefully this is one more step toward federation among services.
March 5, 2008 at 12:44 pm
I hope this will be better then the current AIM tie in to Gmail. I’ve had lots of problems with messages not being delivered with out error messages or anything.
If the API is not reliable then it mostly seems like a waste of time.
March 6, 2008 at 12:53 pm
I hope they quickly include a transport to AIM through Google Talk. I don’t like using AIM though GMAIL on a browser! I would rather use a program like Pidgin.