AOL has been seriously testing lifestreaming in various betas for AIM and AIM Connect for a few months now. At TechCrunch50, AOL just announced that lifestreaming will come out of beta on September 22 and will be part of the AIM product portfolio across Windows, Macs, the Web, iPhones and Windows Mobile.

Last week, the paid version of AIM for the iPhone was updated with lifestreaming capabilities. Today, lifestreaming is coming out of beta across AIM 7 for Windows, AIM for Mac, AIM for the Web, and AIM for Windows Mobile.

The lifestream is AOL’s way of melding instant messaging with social streams from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube Digg, and Flickr. Initially it was just one-way, but recently AOL turned on two-way communications for Twitter and Facebook in the AIM beta so that you can update your status on those two services from within AIM. The beta is being used by about 150,000 people. On September 22, those features will be rolled out across the entire AIM user base of 20 million people.

David Liu, the senior vice-president who’s been leading the lifestreaming charge within AOL, notes that on average users in the AIM 7 beta send 20 percent more IMs than other users. The increased engagement is partly because the lifestream draws them in and gives them another reason to open the app. But the new AIM is also far zippier. “It is faster and lighter than all the major competitors via lab testing,” claims Liu (the competitors being Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, and Skype).

As part of the launch, AIM Connect will also be integrated with AddThis across all AOL Media sites to hook back into their lifestreams on AIM, so that they can share content and web pages with their AIM buddies.

Video:

Other Coverage:
AOL embraces Twitter, Facebook with AIM Lifestream CNET.
AOL Integrates LifeStream into AIM AppScout.
TC50: AIM opens up; pegs its future on mobile apps VentureBeat.
AIM Debuts Lifestream Twitter Client ReadWriteWeb.

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The new iPhone app will let you monitor updates from all the services supported by the desktop version of Lifestream. The app also lets you simultaneously post your AIM status updates to Twitter and Facebook — while the Lifestream was read-only until recently (you couldn’t post messages to services other than AIM), the service recently enabled this functionality.

Other new additions to the app include photo uploading, photo viewing on the Lifestream, and various UI improvements.

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In July, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) embraced the stream in a new beta (for both Windows and Mac) and started moving beyond simple IMs. You can now see your Facebook and Twitter feeds, along with AIM buddy updates and feeds from other services.

The problem was that the Twitter and Facebook feeds were only one way. You could read them, but you couldn’t send updates from AIM to the other services. A few weeks ago that changed, and AIM status updates can now appear as updates in Facebook and Twitter as well. There also appears to be a way to comment, or respond, inline to other people’s messages, although I am having trouble getting that feature to work for some reason.

Going both ways turns AIM into a full-fledged Twitter/Facebook client. It is a big deal for AIM because now it can be used as both a private and public IM client. While stream readers such as TweetDeck and Seesmic already have two-way messaging capabilities with Twitter and Facebook, Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger are still stuck in Read-Only Land.

The AIM Beta doesn’t have the Twitter integration working perfectly yet. Some updates and comments seem to never get through, while others do just fine. On the Facebook side, it is working much smoother. But AIM is making the right moves in an attempt to become an all-in-one instant communications hub. AOL’s new communications chief, Brad Garlinghouse, should keep pushing in this direction.

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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.

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Instant messaging apps are perhaps the perfect use for Push Notification, which allows you to use such services without requiring that they be open at all time. In our test of the pre-release beta version of the AIM app with Push, the messages were sent almost instantaneously. In testing it out right now, it looks to be just as fast.

When you first fire up this new version of AIM, it asks you if you’d like to receive Push notifications. You can change this at any time in the settings. And you can also choose if you’d like the notifications to be brief (only say that you have a new IM), feature the sender’s name only, be normal size, or full size.

You can also set how you’d like Push messages to show up on your phone for each app in the device’s settings. You can have it pop up a message, play a sound, badge your icon or do any combination of those.

And Push works with both the free [iTunes link] and paid version [iTunes link] of the app. The $2.99 paid version removes all advertising.

Push is great for services like IM, but it doesn’t resolve the lack of iPhone background support for all apps. With Push you still can’t listen to Pandora while doing something else on the web, for example. I still believe it’s only a matter of time before we see some sort of third-party background task support as well.

Update: While users are reporting that they aren’t receiving notifications to update their apps yet, if you use the links above, it is the latest version with Push.

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Push Notification, for those who haven’t been following news about it for the past year, is the system Apple developed to alleviate the fact that it won’t allow third party apps to run in the background of the iPhone. Apple claims there are security concerns, battery life concerns and performance concerns that prevent background apps from being feasible at this time on the iPhone (though the company is considering ways to do background apps in the future). Instead, it has asked developers to use its servers to push out certain tasks (like IMs) that come to your phone even when that application isn’t running.

Apple first talked about Push Notification a year ago at WWDC, and said it should be available around September of 2008. When that deadline came and went, Apple was largely silent, only remarking briefly that the system wasn’t yet ready and it wanted to make sure it was perfect before rolling it out. A smart move considering the rough start its MobileMe service go off to. So we waited and waited, until finally Apple announced that it would be a part of the iPhone 3.0 software, due out June 17.

Watch the video below to see Push Notification in action with AIM. One quick note: The video makes it look like there may be a delay between an IM sent and received, but I’m told it’s basically instantaneous — under a second.

[thanks Kyle]

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Available in two tasty flavors, free (”AIM Free”) and paid (”AIM Paid”), AIM 2.0 for iPhone now provides SMS notifications, has location-aware services, and supports multiple accounts (among other updates). It appears as though all of the application updates have been included in both the free and paid versions, with the major (and obvious) difference being the inclusion of ads in the buddy list of the AIM Free app.

So, what’s the big deal here? What do all the changes mean? Well, for one thing, now when you first sign in, the app will ask you if you want to share your current location:

Want to see where your friends are hanging out? You can share your location with your Buddies (or everyone) and see Buddies who are sharing their location.

Users are given three options: 1. No, don’t share location (default); 2. Share only with people on my Buddy list; or 3. Share with everyone. Once you’ve made your selection (let’s say we pick option 2 or 3), a new Group will be added – “Near Me” – showing other contacts within your vicinity. As Ars Technica points out, “there is no control over how large one’s nearby radius is” and thus, it is not exactly clear how near or far any of your contacts may be from your current location. What you can control, is the frequency of your location updates by navigating to: My Info > Preferences > (scroll down) Frequency. Here, you can select between 3 options: 1. On Startup; 2. Every 5 min. (default); or 3. Every 2000 feet.

Beyond location-awareness, AIM 2.0 also features SMS capabilities. Users now have the option to send an IM to a screen name, or alternatively, can send an SMS to a contact’s phone number (works on both iPhone and iPod touch). The app now includes both a buddy list and a contact list, to take advantage of these new features. Also, you can now stay logged-in for up to 24 hours, even if the AIM app has been closed. This allows you (iPhone users only) to get notifications via SMS when you receive a new IM and offers a work-around until Apple enables real Push notifications.

Other notable new features include the ability to use photos (taken with an iPhone) as buddy icons and the option to configure/switch between multiple screen names at any time. Are these new features enough to take down competing IM apps such as IM+, Fring, Truphone, and others? Only time will tell.

AIM Free (2.0.1) is currently available for download, while the cleverly named (but as yet unpriced) AIM Paid is still pending approval (at the time of this writing).

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AIM 6.0 is built on top of the experimental project AIM Triton. That means that a lot of “value added” features like links to AOL music will be present – perhaps people like that but judging from the screenshot after the fold I can’t imagine using it. Desktop IM should be open source or a loss leader with unobtrusive ads at most. If you are an AIM user who doesn’t like the upgrade and insists on still using AIM anyway see oldversion.com.

AIM is Windows only but does have a new API, which could lead to interesting developments. The absence of interoperability across platforms means that Adium or Trillian are the only real options for heavy IM users, but casual users will have their experience changed by tonight’s upgrade. If you don’t mind a Windows only IM that can’t communicate with other IM platforms, has plenty of advertisements and a number of honestly useful features like mobile integration – then the new AIM could be for you. Highlights of the new version include the following:

Conversation logging. If you are using AIM for conversations that are at all important, you want to save a log of those conversations. It’s essential. Opt-out is an option. Adium and Skype do this for me, who does it for you?

Offline messaging. Send messages to people even when they aren’t online, they will receive them when they sign on. Also essential, just note the time stamp of any message you get when you first sign on – it may not be urgent any more. Skype does this for me.

RSS integration with social networks. Inform your buddies whenever you update your page on YouTube, Digg, Flickr, Xanga, and other accounts. This is a very compelling features that will ramp up page views substantially. Call it a Multiply/Facebook/Vox style newsfeed or call it Zaptxt, it’s the state of the art. The only question is how to manage permissions and privacy.

AIM presence and more on AIM Pages. That’s good. MySpace presence indicator, MeeboMe widgets and more – social networking and IM go together like social networking and site mail. Very well.

Mobile Dashboard – one-click access to the Buddy List, manage mobile alerts, reminders and IM forwarding – have IMs sent to your cell phone once you log off the desktop AIM client. This sounds good and bad, it’s a monster in and of itself that deserves detailed review.

1,000,000 friends. That means no limits on friends, which is good. Limits on the number of people you add as friends is as silly as designating all your contacts “friends” is, but hey – one issue at a time.

Amp’d Mobile will offer the Mobile AIM free for the next 2 months. Amp’d and Helio are in a war to see who can add more 3rd party services. That’s great.

Together these updates represent a major relaunch for AIM. AIM is the world leader in IM, so this is going to change a lot of peoples’ experiences with the medium. It’s still hard to get too excited about any of it without cross platform interoperability, so I’ll continue using Adium and Skype IM. It’s good to know what millions of young people will now be introduced to though. Unless there is a major consumer backlash against the now long feature list, and I doubt there will be, then tonight’s relaunch looks like good news for AOL.

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