AIM Tunes: Music Sharing At Its Best
One of the most innovative services the AIM team has launched recently is Buddy Tunes. This week, we have taken this idea a couple of steps further with the alpha release of AIM Tunes. AIM Tunes lets you extend your music library to include music shared by your buddies. You can browse music, add it to a play list, and stream it all from a web interface and no matter where your friends are located.
Getting started is easy. Simply download and install the AIM plugin. Whenever you want to listen to music, click AIM Tunes under the Action menu in AIM.
This is Alpha quality software so you may run into a bug or two. But for the most part, it works well.
Download the plug-in from the AIM Gallery.
Former AOLers Launch Startup
It’s great to see friends and former AOL coworkers, Kerry, Joe, and Jason, launch a startup. Mixx.com is a Social News site in the same vein as digg but with lots of personalization and customization features. It is a nice looking site and is very intuitive and usable. After a short five months or so, it is a great release. Jason just posted about it on his blog.
Mixx is getting some good coverage on Webware and TechCrunch.
I learned something about innovation today
I am proud to say the AIM team is pretty good at innovation and have lead the pack at AOL and in the world of Instant Messaging. Innovation is very important to me and my team. It is one of the things that makes work fun. So when I heard Tom Kelley, the GM of Ideo, was coming to AOL to speak to us about innovation, I quickly signed up. Tom is the author of “The Art of Innovation” and “The Ten Faces of Innovation“. His company, Ideo, has made a great business out of helping others innovate. He said there are 500 people at Ideo and they have worked with hundreds of companies. They have learned what works and what doesn’t. While we have done well within our environment, Ideo has done well across many industries.
Tom mainly spoke about his new book, “The Ten Faces of Innovation”. He made a few points to emphasize the importance of innovation. Then he spoke about the roles or “faces” such as experimenter, cross-pollinator, hurdler, and more. In his opinion, the most important role is the Anthropologist. I’ll bet it has been a long time since you heard of that profession.
According to Tom, the Anthropologist…
“… is the person who ventures into the field to observe how people interact with products, services, and experiences in order to come up with new innovations. The Anthropologist is extremely good at re-framing a problem in a new way, humanizing the scientific method to apply it to daily life. Anthropologists share such distinguishing characteristics as the wisdom to observe with a truly open mind; empathy; intuition; the ability to “see” things that have gone unnoticed”.
He made the point that you can’t expect to get innovative ideas from customers. They may have incremental ideas but not the big innovations. You have to observe your customers and find the hidden opportunities.
Where can I find an Anthropologist?
ICQ is not really taking over AIM
According an article in Ynet news,
“ICQ Israel will soon be responsible for the software development of AOL instant messenger, or AIM, following a recent decision by the company.”
I have fielded as many questions about this article as I have about the looming layoffs at AOL. With all the other rumors going around AOL, this article came at a bad time and delivered an inaccurate message. The AIM and ICQ teams have been talking about much better collaboration for a while now. A bunch of us from Dulles, VA went to Israel in July to meet with the ICQ team to work out a plan for developing desktop clients together. We accomplished our goal by building a plan to reinstrument the ICQ client to use OpenAIM as the client infrastructure. ICQ already shares most back-end services with AIM. Next, AIM features will be added to ICQ so the client can effectively serve both products. We will build a future version of the AIM client on top of the teriffic ICQ client platform.
Development of OpenAIM, the host platform, Web IM, and some desktop client work will remain in Dulles.
The ICQ team in Tel Aviv is full of very talented and dedicated people. I first started working with the founders 1999 after AOL acquired ICQ. I have always enjoyed working with them and have developed a deep respect for the team in Tel Aviv. Over the past year, they have developed ICQ6 into a fantastic client platform with capabilities that will serve our customers and our business well.
