IM Host

1:41:10 PM EDT
Take a little bit of chat and a little bit of listservs and mix it together and get AIM Blast.  You can now have on your buddylist a way to connect with all your friends both on AIM and on SMS. 

The SMS story is really cool because now I can chat with a bunch of SMS folks all at once, and it really useful for coordinating things.  Like when hitting SXSW or WWDC now we can easily plan dinner and stuff from our phones.


Anyway, check it out at http://blast.aim.com



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8:31:03 PM EDT
Last week we launched our WIMZI widget which allows anonymous chat with the page owner.  For example you can place the widget on your myspace page and as folks visit your page they can chat with you.  Even better if you are using a recent version of AIM you can watch the buddy list group for the widget and see how many folks are visiting your page at the same time!

Of course there are several other widgets out there that do similiar things, but ours has a few advantages:
* It works directly with AIM, you don't need another account
* It hides your AIM screen name from the person visiting the page by default - other widgets out there aren't anonymous, or expose the name in the protocol
* It is Open - the web service API it uses is documented here, anyone can build their own version
* There is both a Javascript and Flash version, so it will work on almost any page or device



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6:35:18 AM EST
We've updated the API some this last week with 2 big additions
* You can now access your own vanity information, the data on AIM Today about IMs Sent/Received and other interesting items with the getVanityInfo call.
* It is now possible to send Data IMs between users.  This makes it easy to create simple web games and such.  Currently we have some in house demos that Steve should be making public soon.  Basically to use it your client asserts a capability and then addresses messages to that capability.  So for example their might be battleship, checkers, chess capabilities.

We have also fixed a bunch of bugs, especially with making sure the output actually matches what is in the documentation. :)


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1:07:28 PM EST
Today we launch another new AIM related API set, called Web AIM API. 

The most important feature is the APIs allow the web developer to access the buddy list of the user viewing their web page.

Now obviously there are some security issues, and the end user has to go thru some annoying consent dialogs, but basically we are opening up AIM buddylists to the world.  I can't wait to see what people create once they realize this is more then just a client.

Unlike previous APIs we have released we have finally joined the JSON/JSONP bandwagon and also support a easy to use XML format.  Included with the APIs is a reference Web AIM Client, but it is important to understand that the APIs are much more then that. 

Currently the APIs are still in beta, as we work out bugs and configuration.  The way we do cross site long polling is really cool, more on that in the future.

Steve has a demo site to prove the cross site nature



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8:59:21 AM EDT
Wow, just found out that Microsoft bought SmarterChild (or the company that runs it :-) last week.  Press Release I remember when SmarterChild was a huge hit, was getting hundreds of IMs a second, and everyone loved it.  Then some annoying legal thing happen and it never fully recovered.  Just last week I tried it out again and found out they removed stock quotes :(

I still think Bots (at least on AIM) haven't reached their full potential, and some day we will see someone take advantage of that.  Or maybe we still need to add something to enable them better.  It will be interesting to see what Microsoft does with Bots now, rumor was their Bot contest didn't go as well as it could. 

We also support Open Bots now to make it some what easier to build consumer bots, although I think we need to add a framework to make it even easier.


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1:13:05 PM EDT
Lots of new stuff available.  Even more coming soon.

New build of Triton! It is faster now, and getting better.  

New AIM Location Plugin, share your location with folks!  This requires the Triton above.

AIM Smart Groups!!  One of my favorite features.  You can now have groups in your buddy list that are autogenerated based on critera you provide.  Such as you can find everyone who has "lunch" in their profile, or is at your favorite bar.  This works with most clients.


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8:30:18 AM EST
Meebo just did a really cool thing.  They are allowing end users to do the translations for them (nothing new), however they are using Wiki technology to enable this.  This is so cool at many levels.   The translations are public, editable by anyone, have history, new phrases can be updated almost instantly.  Evil users (which are out there) which make evil changes, can be undone in normal wiki fashion, and you have full change management.  In just a few days it has been very successful.

Of course for the big languages of their user base, they'll eventually want to lock down sections of the translations.  But for the languages that aren't as popular for their users, they could leave them open forever.The other cool thing they are doing, at least so far, is they are just doing string localization.  None of this moving graphics around and removing features and such based on each language that always takes forever.  This is also a favorite approach of msft when first releasing a product, just localize the strings.  You can always do special internationalized versions later.

Maybe someday we can do something similiar with Triton.  Obviously Meebo, being a web client, has an advantage of the strings being downloaded everytime.  We would need to build logic to check some web site for the files, etc. 

But it could be done.

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7:01:13 AM EST
Go check it out!  Build AIM clients! Build plugins for AIM Triton or any other aimcc client!

Finally we will get to see what developers out there build with sanctioned APIs for a Windows platform.  Don't worry Mac & Linux are coming too and some other web services too.

BTW, thank you M&Y for giving us that final push that was needed to get this out the door.


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8:24:39 PM EST
I believe in Plugins.

My  attempts at open source software, such as Java AIM client (ok not very open source), TiK and now my Sonos web controller all support Plugins.  With TiK we added it near the very beginning, while with the sonos web controller and the Java AIM client it took a while.  This was a mistake.  Plugins should be the very first thing that any "big" software project worth writing should support.  Probably before any UI is added. By supporting plugins you have to think more about the architecture and make good decisions right from the start.  Although I've seen plenty of bad Plugin systems out there, some kind of Plugin system is better then no Plugin system.

What IS surprising is there is no standard way to do Plugins.  Seems like every software project has a different way for installing, loading, enabling, and whatever else the Plugins.  Tcl, Perl, Java have some frameworks for doing them, but last I looked (although it has been a while) none of them are actually any good.  No one can agree on the Plugin name either, are they Modules, Packages, Plugins, ...  Who knows.  All I know is "big" software should support Plugins. :-)

I'm very excited for Triton to support Plugins, the Java and TiK client had plugins at least 6 years ago, OMG it has been that long! Its going to be great to see the official main stream client have it.


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12:54:08 PM EST
Just found out it is possible to launch the current AIM Fight flash web page with screennames already entered.  So it would be possible to add an entry box on a web page to do this.

http://www.aimfight.com/index.php?p1=sn1&p2=sn2



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