A post on TechCrunch caught my attention this morning. Schmap is launching their city guides for the iPhone and iPodTouch. These free travel guides are a nice way to get info on a city online or offline. As readers of this blog know, I travel a lot to meet with developers who are building Open AIM applications and to evangelize Open AIM. Schmap city guides can be browsed online or offline, so before I get onto the plane I usually download Schmap so I can browse a city guide in flight. Schmap caught my attention last year when they asked to use one of my photos on Flickr that I took during W3C for their city guide for Calgary. If you are doing a lot of travel this summer, check out Schmap as an alternative or supplement to TripAdvisor or other online travel sites.

PS – Here is the photo that Schmap used from my Calgary collection:

The above post title was a comment that Dave Recordon from SixApart made during his talk on Thursday at Web 2.0 Expo on Open Web 2.0 Platforms. In his talk he pointed out how AIM was the most closed, “walled garden” messaging network in the space 3 years ago. Now AIM is the standard in building an open synchronous network, from our SDK, Web APIs or documented protocol you can build on top of our network if you are a Linux C++ developer, an iPhone Objective-C developer, a Flash developer or PHP/Script jockey. Thanks Dave for the kind words.

Open AIM is not the only property at AOL getting love today. Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch wrote a cool article about AOL’s strong growth in our sites. The reason for this growth is all the revamping we have done on sites like webmail, AOL.com and even AIM.com. Things are definitely getting exciting here at AOL as we continue to build on the success of our open platforms and products.