Better late than never

I came across this a few mins ago and felt compelled to share it immediately:

I had high hopes for AIM Share a while back.  It never took off the way I thought it would.  It is nice to stumble upon it on the wild wild net.

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!

Your data stream – it’s right under your nose

There has been some discussion in the blog world recently about your Data Stream | Life Stream | Traffic and Flow. The basic idea is a single stream of all the activity you create across the web. Emily Chang put it very well in her post My Data Stream:

“For now, this activity stream idea is providing the start to a holistic view of my activity across online networks: both my own and the ones I use. In turn, this acts as a conduit for you, the reader. Rather than just a static “recommended links” page or a blogroll, the data stream opens up my activity to you in semi-realtime and at one website.”

This is really the whole point of the AIM Buddy Feed. I’m happy to see the idea getting some traction independently. All the items you create, share, and say should be wrapped up in one easy to consume stream. And this stream really isn’t for you, it is about you and is consumed by people who are interested in you. It also gives people a way to interact with you by starting a conversation about something in your stream. The interaction is why you want to share these items in the first place, isn’t it?

With AIM Buddy Updates, you don’t have to use a feed reader or go to a web site to see my stream … but you can if you want to. Just watch for the indicator on your buddy list. I believe this is much more consumable by a mass market.

The challenge AIM and all the stream aggregators face is populating the stream. Most people don’t know what RSS and feeds are. Most people don’t understand how you can add feeds from all the services on the net you use to create a single data stream. How do you explain that? Good language may help. Support from sites such that host pictures, profiles, and blogs can help by adding the AIM Share and AIM Buddy Updates links or equivalents to their sites. I hope you saw my post here that explains these. But I’m worried that most people won’t understand it even though it is very useful.

BTW – you can go to the AIM Buddy Updates settings page to populate your AIM stream.