Extend your music library with BuddyTunes

Like music? You will love the AIM BuddyTunes plug-in. Justin Cohen and friends have created the plug-in that lets you share your iTunes library with your friends and lets you listen to music from your friends iTunes libraries. It sounds complicated but it is very easy to use. Simply download the plugin here, install it, and you are done. You should see music your friends are sharing. You will see it inside iTunes as shared libraries like this:

Make sure you are running AIM 6.1. You will see music from any of your buddies who are running AIM 6.1, the BuddyTunes plugin and iTunes. You should share your iTunes music as well by going into iTunes Preferences and Sharing tab. Select “Share my library on my local network”.

The plugin uses a feature of Open AIM called custom sessions. Custom sessions allows you to pass any data between one AIM client and another. In this case, we are passing iTunes and Bonjour protocol data. You can read more about custom sessions at developer.aim.com.

If you work at AOL, you can check out a video here that shows how easy it is to set up and use. Enjoy!

A Most Excellent Mashup

Andy Wick and Elena Furman from the AIM Host team have created a mashup of Google Earth and AIM that is truly cool. It shows you in real time new IM conversations. It uses live data from the AIM system (respecting privacy) and draws a line between the city where the originator sits and the receiver sits. So if I sent you an IM, there would be a line between Oakton, VA and wherever you are sitting now. You can use the features of Google Earth to zoom in and out and see any part of the world. Give it a try. You will be impressed.

Check it out here.

Adding a theme to AIM 6

Very cool. Greg has figured out how to add a UNC theme to AIM 6. I think this is a sign of things to come. Check it out for yourself over on Greg’s blog. It looks like this…