Open up wide
Comments(2)
When I signed into meebo this morning, I got a little pop-up with a blurb about a partnership with AOL. I was immediately intrigued. Unfortunately, muscle memory kicked in too fast, and I closed the box — the same one that opens every time I sign in — before I even realized I wanted to read it. So I signed out and back in.
Apparently, AOL is finally opening AIM up really wide. They’re talking about full protocol documentation (that’s the “oscar” protocol, not the crappy TOC one), letting people use their own AIM libraries, and full access to all the functionality (voice, video, filesharing, etc.) — as far as I know, this stuff has never been available before.
I also noticed that you can now convert any AIM screen name into a “bot”: the various rate limits are removed (or heightened, at the very least), you can’t be warned, and are allowed to be added to more people’s buddy lists. In return, you can’t initiate conversations.
You know what this means.
The screen name crabbychild has been successfully converted to an AIM® Bot.
Oh no.
Although not being able to initiate conversations is actually a pretty good way to protect against abuse.
Thanks for the feedback!
Just a point of clarification. Bots can initiate conversations if they have a commercial bot agreement in place with AOL. For example Wall Street Journal is a commercial bot as are others that can be found on the AIM Gallery at http://gallery.aim.com.
Bots built with the Open AIM SDK allows the developer to get very creative with the features. Open AIM SDK bots can transfer files, share images or even accept audio or video real time conversations. For code samples check out dev.aol.com/openaim and for more info on Open AIM read along at gregsmind.com.