Shellen tells me that, eventually, the new AIM could morph into a truly cross-service app like Brizzly, but that’s not going to happen anytime soon. You’ll only receive updates from those services that are relevant to you, for example when someone mentions you on Twitter, or likes one of your Instagram photos. It includes all of the features above, except for video chat, and seems exceptionally polished for an initial release.Īll of the new AIM apps feature integration with Twitter and Instagram, though not in the way you’d expect. I’ve been testing out the new AIM iPhone app over the weekend, and it’s definitely an improvement over the previous boring and buggy AIM app. Shellen wouldn’t speak to any file size limit, but I would imagine it’s somewhere around a few gigabytes per user. Images that you’ve uploaded will also be displayed inline, just like when you link to an image somewhere on the web. You can easily share links to files that you’ve uploaded via AIM and on the web. Now when you upload a file, it gets stored on AOL’s servers, where it will sit for around 72 to 100 hours. Shellen’s crew also fixed AIM’s file sharing problems by giving up on the idea of direct peer-to-peer sharing. (I wouldn’t be surprised if AV eventually gets integrated into the new AIM AOL would be stupid not to do so.) For now, Shellen says, group video conferencing is available via AV by AIM, a simple web-based solution. Video chats also seem improved over previous versions of AIM, but it doesn’t yet support group video chats. Your updates are now broadcast to specific people who follow you. The new AIM also takes a cue from Twitter and Facebook in the way it handles status updates. That adds some nice spice to chats that previously consisted of text and links. In this respect, the new AIM resembles one of the hot new mobile messaging services like Kik or Facebook Messenger.Ĭonversations are also more interesting now, thanks to the ability to post videos and images inline. You can also sign in with your Facebook and Google Talk accounts to chat on those services, which limits the need to juggle multiple clients.Īnother nice addition: You can send messages to friends while they’re offline (and vice versa), which will be instantly received when they sign on. You can easily add multiple friends to a conversation, which is infinitely more useful than boring old group chat rooms. Conversations are also synchronized, so you can easily hop back into a chat on your phone that you started on your desktop. There’s less of a focus on the buddy list, and instead recent conversations are highlighted. That’s obvious from the way the new apps are organized, which resemble Twitter clients more than they do past AIM versions. Thing Labs was best known for its social media reader Brizzly, and Shellen admitted to me that there was some Brizzly DNA in the new AIM. The revamped messaging client comes courtesy of Jason Shellen and his team, who joined AOL after it snapped up Thing Labs a year ago. The new AIM looks so dramatically different that you could easily mistake it for something from a fresh-faced startup - and that wouldn’t be far from the truth.
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