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.

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.

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.

AIM 6 Beta 2 released

As always, the hard working AIM team has released a new version.  After a couple years of going backwards, I am happy to be able to say every month brings the best new AIM client ever.  This release is no exception even though it is labeled Beta.  The team is striving to ship release quality each month now…and we are very close to achieving that goal.  I haven’t seen any bugs in my daily use and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this Beta to everyone.

We have a lot of goodness in this version.  You can see a lot of it just by looking at it.  The first thing you may notice is the Ad is at the bottom of the buddy list.  Next you will notice a free-form status entry box.  Gone are the days of multiple clicks to set a custom status message.  Just start typing.  The default setting for the buddy list is to show your buddies status under their screenname.  We would like to have your feedback on this so we can know if you like it of if we need to make it better.  Here is a list of other changes:

• Connection settings: AIM can help you configure your firewall or proxy settings. Look for the Connection tab in your settings manager.
• Status message in the Buddy List: Broadcast a personal message to your friends, even when you’re available. Simply type your message in the field under your screen name at the top of your Buddy List. It will appear under your screen name on their Buddy List and when they hover over you name too. More status integration is coming soon.
• My Quick Access Panel: Rollover your screen name at the top of the Buddy List and get one-click access to your settings, email, expressions and buddy info
• Buddy Details: From the Buddy List, roll over your buddy’s screen name and take action. Send a text message, call their PC, send an email and more. Don’t forget to try expanding the form and save info for your buddy.
• Tips from AIM: Did you know you could do that on AIM? Look for a tip on the IM window.
• Updated Advertisement placement: Conveniently moved to the bottom of the Buddy List to allow easier access to your menus.
• Text Message Mode: Don’t waste your mobile phone text messages. Send them from AIM. Clicking the TXT Msg button on the IM form is just one new place you can access this mode.

Please give this a try yourself and let us know what you think.  Click here to get it.

AIM for iPhone — Tiny Buddy IM

Thanks to James Burke, we (those of you who have an iPhone) can use AIM on your iPhone. Cool! James wrote about it on his blog. The client is basic but it works. You can try it out by clicking over to http://tybyim.com/ on your iPhone or using the Safari web browser.

UPDATE: Check out the official AIM for iPhone in the Apple iTunes Store.  Click here.

ICQ TV Commercial

ICQ recently launced an IM client with Orange Israel. Orange produced a TV commercial for it! Check it out here.

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!

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…

AIM 6.1 and AIM Lite 0.32 Launched

Thanks to Greg and being late with this post, I can simply point you to his blog posts to get more info about our AIM 6.1 and AIM Lite 0.32 releases. The team has worked really hard to get AIM 6.1 out the door. I am very proud of everyone for the contributions they offered. I would love to thank everyone by name but there are so many people who played a part, I am sure to omit some. But to the core team who really made it happen — you know who you are — Great job!!

AIM 6.1 started before the holiday and had a fairly short dev cycle. We managed to pack a lot into this release including:

• Full screen P2P video sessions
• Better mobile/SMS integration
• Windows Vista support
• Images in AIM Profiles
• much more including a little skinning hack as documented by Greg.

I hope you enjoy the client. As always, we like to get feedback both positive and negative.
Thanks also to Justin Cohen and friends for continuing the effort on LAIM. It’s a great little client.

Download AIM 6.1 here.

Download LAIM here.