AOL Opens Up the AIM Instant Messaging Network

AVIDJockey writes "In a pleasantly surprising move, AOL has changed its tune when it comes to third-party access to the company's chat network. America Online has recently launched a service called OpenAIM 2.0, which provides open, uninhibited access to services like Meebo, or all-in-one IM clients like Pidgin, allowing them to freely and easily use the AIM instant messaging network. 'At the moment, multi-platform IM desktop clients like Pidgin or Adium (the popular Mac client) generally rely on hacking and reverse engineering access to chat networks run by AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft and others. Not only is that bad for developers since it means more work, it also means that such clients often can't use all the features of a particular network.'"

And that's not all!

[Timex]

It might be my imagination, but GTalk (through the GMail interface) allows one to open an AIM connection. I wonder if it's related to this?

Re:Adium

[The Ancients]

Good news. Adium sometimes wouldn't work with iChat when it came to file transfers. Fixing that alone might actually get me using Adium.

I wonder if this paves the way to Adium working with iChat audio and video conferencing?

This would be great. I much prefer Adium's interface and functionality to iChat's, but I still have to switch to iChat now and then for video conferencing, which is a pain.

For Macs there is aMSN [cmq.qc.ca] for video chat for MSN, but no other 3rd party clients come to mind for video on any of the major proprietary chat protocols.

Re:Huh?

[elzurawka]

"AOL is going even further, offering such services the option to run AOL-served advertisements as part of a revenue sharing plan. So far, AOL hasn't given too many details on the advertising tie-in, but more details will be released next month." RTA So, pidgin can now add ad's to the bottom, and share the profits with AOL.

Restrictions

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

From the FAQ [aol.com]:

Are there any restrictions on what I can build?

We tried to make the Open AIM Program as restriction-free and flexible as possible. But in order to help protect our network and users, certain rules apply.

• We ask that you incorporate two value-added features of the AIM service into your application. The full list that you can pick from is listed in our Additional Feature Requirements webpage.
• Although we have removed many restrictions on usage and development, we still do not permit developers to build Open AIM applications that are interoperable with other IM networks. (Multi-headed applications are now allowed). Please refer to the Developers License Agreement for additional details.

Re:Required features

[mmcuh]

Can GPL-compatible software (or really any kind of open-source software) be written, given these restrictions?

No.

Re:Huh?

[geminidomino]

I've found some problems in pidgin... namely, messages like to disappear into the ether(net?) with no indication whatsoever...

It can make for interesting conversations.

Re:Required features

[moosesocks]

Because of Jabber's decentralized nature, it's not hard to imagine E-Mail providers bundling IM services with their e-mail packages.

Heck, a handful of them already do just that (Google being the biggest and most obvious such provider)

It's not as if IM traffic is particularly bandwidth-intensive. It's one of the most lightweight protocols in use on the internet today.

Re:Huh?

[TubeSteak]

I did RTFA, but I'm not limiting my imagination to a bunch of companies tying their networks together to make more money. And unless something changed, Pidgin is GPL... meaning anyone can grab the source and cut out the code that loads advertisements.

Now that the network is completely open, protocols and all, the only reason anyone would use an ad-laden client is from inertia & familiarity, not because those clients are 'better'.

Re:Required features

[Surye]

Although we have removed many restrictions on usage and development, we still do not permit developers to build Open AIM applications that are interoperable with other IM networks. (Multi-headed applications are now allowed). Please refer to the Developers License Agreement for additional details.

Pidgin could not implement this if they wanted to.

Re:Well...

[__aaahtg7394]

FWIW, Aimster never had any problems with AOL*. We've had many more problems with libfaim/libpurple, which are the open source implementations of OSCAR. In particular, AOL has engaged an authentication arms race, repeatedly making it harder to legally log in to AIM. The newest technique (https submission) looked like it was pretty much the death knell for independent OSCAR implementations. It's really difficult to RE, and allowed them freedom to use bigger, more trademarkable shared secrets. (Copyright has exceptions for compatibility purposes; trademark, not so much)

AOL has always had at least a partial open network, in the form of TOC. Surprisingly, they have kept it open for all these years, despite the early pessimism of many people (myself chief among them). This latest opening is an interesting move, and probably hints at new market realities in IM. It's good to see the space changing, especially in a continuing push towards openness.

Sadly, it means that all my contract work for reverse engineering OSCAR (etc) just dried up =)

* Aimster didn't actually use AOL for anything; they just had a data extracting proxy that sat between the user and the IM network, so they could show presence info in their custom UI. I actually worked there for a short while, and extended that proxy to support ICQ, amongst other things. (It was a terribly-run company, which is why I quit after only a few months. If they _had_ used AIM for the file transfers, as I was suggesting, they likely wouldn't have had nearly the legal trouble they did. And, any case against them would also amount to an equal case against AOL, which makes for an interesting set of motivations...)

Re:Still around?

[garvon]

It's called email. Remember that?

Re:Still around?

[strabes]

Pidgin (and gaim) have had this feature for years, and it's protocol-independent.

Re:Required features

[jay-be-em]

Ugh. That reminds me. The other day at work I installed aol's aim client because a chat room had been set up to communicate while we went through some procedures (I usually just use gmail for chat). Suddenly Firefox's home page had been changed to aol.com, I had a hideous toolbar and some crappy chat bots added in my gmail chat list. Christ. Fuck this company.

Re:And that's not all!

[i.of.the.storm]

There's also an experimental Jabber server for AIM, I think the GMail interface has to do more with that than with this.

For more information, see http://wiki.jabber.org/index.php/AOL_Alpha [jabber.org] . Haven't gotten it to work myself with Pidgin though.

Re:Well...

[stickystyle]

Yes, other servers can connect to google. And yes there is support in the XMPP protocol for encryption (SSL) from the client to the server, and then from source to the destination server.

Re:Gtalk is not all that open

[Azh Nazg]

Sure, they've documented the voice protocol used; said protocol is called Jingle, and specs are available from the XMPP Council, as XEP-0166. In fact, Google submitted Jingle as a standard fairly soon after GTalk came out. Not their fault that not many clients bothered to use libjingle (a library implementing Jingle, under the BSD license, written by Google).

Re:Well...

[transwarp]

In Jabber, you can used both Off-The-Record encryption, and GPG, depending on what the client supports. There's also a much newer standard for encrypted sessions, but I don't know if it has any support yet. http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/ [xmpp.org] XEP-0116 and XEP-0200 are related to the new one.

Re:And that's not all!

[mhall119]

After some more digging, it appears that you must implement "at least" 2 of the 5 "features". I put "features" in quotes because it includes displaying the AIM Start Page, installing the AIM Toolbar, or including AOL advertisements. So it's really more of a "You can use OpenAIM if you do something to make us money".

To be fair to AOL, your 2 features can just be showing Buddy Info and Buddy Icons, which presumably don't make them money, and most AIM clients would want to have anyway. Still, this whole requirements seems odd to me.