AOL took another step towards fully embracing the lifestream today with the release of a slew of new AIM clients in beta and a new AIM Lifestream site, which brings together status updates from your AIM buddies with your activity streams from Facebook and Twitter. Earlier today, AOL quietly launched beta versions of AIM 7 for Windows, AIM for Mac 2.0, and a new AIM Windows Mobile client. (An upgrade to its iPhone app cannot be far behind).
All three of the AIM betas include a new “Lifestream” tab, which allows you to read all of the updates from your friends on Facebook and Twitter, along with public status updates from your AIM buddies. You can also share videos and links via your YouTube and Delicious accounts. Expect more services to be added. The AIM clients also include the familiar “Buddies” tab, which lets you launch private IM conversations with your AIM buddies, and a “Me” tab shows your profile stats, updates, and notifications.
What AOL is doing here is combining a FriendFeed-style approach of bringing together social updates from different services across the web with more private IM conversations. AIM status messages function as public utterances, and already on the AIM Lifestream site you can upload photos and comment on or indicate that you “like” a particular message from a buddy (expect these features to make its way into the clients soon as well). AOL is not so much trying to copy Twitter or FriendFeed as it is trying to bridge the private one-on-one message stream of AIM with the more public social conversation streams across the Web.
Inserting the lifestream into AIM is part of a much larger strategy, which began with its acquisition of Socialthing nearly a year ago. Last February, it brought Socialthing-powered lifestreams into Bebo, and last April it began experimenting with bringing lifestreaming and chat to Websites via a chat toolbar. That effort soon spread to other AOL sites and recently was renamed AIM Connect. (Guess who it is trying to compete against with that product).
The AIM beta clients provide further clues about where AOL is going, but are not yet fully-baked products. The Twitter and Facebook streams are only one-way, for instance. AIM can obviously support two-way communications (one of the big selling points of Socialthing), but AOL probably needs to negotiate that with Twitter and Facebook first. It could also use a URL shortener to make it easier to pass links. But AIM is huge, with around 50 million active users. I wonder how fast it would take for AIM to become one of the top Twitter clients.
does anyone remember using aim punters? oh, those were the days.
we would like to see different streems like twitter/fb/flickr in different tabs, than all clubbed in single timeline.
Use the Show dropdown at the top of the Lifestream tab to show only a single stream.
People still use AOL? Love that they’re taking aggressive steps to up their game.
People still use AIM? I thought that was for high school, half-a-dozen years ago.
Aol vs FriendFeed lol
I can’t handle that much information from a life stream. If I was a grandma I would love to see every twitter post, youtube videos favs, and flickr uploads from my grandkids.
You can rate what you think of here.
http://appusefu...pp/n/friendfeed FriendFeed
If only they were aggressive with web-based “Buddy Profiles” 7 years ago…
This vividly reminds me of the year 2005, where we were working on the service called buddygopher (http://www.buddygopher.com/, although the only thing that is left is the development blog). With a single multithreaded perl bot using the OSCAR module, we were able to collect thousands of away messages and publish them online ; why didn’t we extend the idea to a general microblogging platform back then ?
And the ‘Buddy Profiles’ – we were partnering for a while with a site called buddy4u (closed down at this point, so it seems) – and all this much before Twitter and ‘feeds’ started spreading out.
Obviously AIM didn’t take a full advantage of these either.
This reminds me of 2005 and a service we’ve been working on called BuddyGopher – at this point only a development blog is left ; with a single PostgreSQL + BerkeleyDB + multithreaded perl script, we were able to collect 200,000 AIM away messages and publish them online in a very similar way – of course neither Twitter, nor FriendFeed existed at that time. It’s good to see AIM is (finally!) taking advantage of this opportunity we were not quite able to explore back then.
200,000 messages per day of course
Kudos to AIM!
I mean with everyone expanding and becoming better, they are expected to follow as well. This one innovation is great! It gives us one bus stop for facebook and twitter (the most used social networking sites) plus AIM for your so exclusive friends. Thanks AIM and I’m expecting for more!
Remind anyone of Final Fantasy VII?
http://en.wikip....org/wiki/Gaia_(Final_Fantasy_VII)#Lifestream
Might be the wrong audience here…
Glad I’m not the only one who noticed. XD;
This is great for AIM! Most of the people I know (I’m 23) are still using the AIM protocol (although maybe not the client) for IMing. A few people use GTalk but its usually in addition to AIM and not in place of it.
what they need to do is embrace the XMPP protocol and allow federation with other services. EMAIL FIXED THIS 30 YEARS AGO get with the times plz k thx
It is great to see this.
Looks cool . wanna see what a feature!!!
i dont use aim b/c iChat for mac works even better w/o the crashes, throw TweetDeck on top of that, and call it a day
This is a big step for AIM.
for me gtalk always stucks…. it goes offline every 10 mins….. its really a buggy,,,,, so using AIM…. its still the best messanger….. yahoo messenger is also good one….
love to see more from AIM…
new trillian astra product has been in beta for quite some time and has all these feeds already built in, not to mention gtalk, msn, icq, aim, yahoo already built in
when they talk about users for these messaging services, i’m assuming they mean accounts, correct? so many people seem to be using multi-headed clients like trillian or adium these days. mostly anecdotal, but i rarely see anyone using the the messenger specific clients for YIM, AIM or gTalk anymore.
AIM hasn’t been the same since version 5.9 (stripped down with Ad-Hack)
Personally I’ve hated every AIM client that was released after 5.9.6089 and I barely use AIM at all on my desktop running Vista because I wasn’t able to find a way to get 5.9 to run on it.
Secretly, I wished that all my friends would convert over to Microsoft Live Messenger but it’ll never happen…
BlackBerry Messenger took over for us.
Glenn — try AIM Pro. It works on Vista, and its an ad-free client. Uses the same approach to AIM as 5.9.
The sad part is that groups within AOL proposed doing this a year and a half ago, but had their heads handed to them by David Liu and Joanna Shields, who were hell-bent on pushing Bebo. Joanna is gone. How long before David is out on his a##?
AOL had lifestreaming in a product called buddy feeds almost three years ago, but the feature was really poorly marketed:
http://blog.agr...ial-networking/
I have an aim account and I can comment on everyone’s statues, except for one persons. All of his other friends can except for me. And i talk to him all the time so I know he didnt block me. Is there any easy way to figure out why this might not be working?