Continuing the momentum of last weeks Open AIM announcement and the AIM on iPhone announcement, this week we shared with the world, the purchase of Bebo. After spending time in the UK and Ireland late last year and seeing all the Bebo users over there I am really excited to welcome them into the family.

One clear thing we hear from our users is that they want ways to do synchronous communication via tools other than the AIM client. Anonymous IM via the Wimzi widget and online presence are very important to users of social networks.

This provides a nice segue to ILoveIM.com. This web messenger application incorporates Open AIM and provides a tab interface for different services. They are actively working on building more AIM services into the application.

The most popular question I have been getting lately has been regarding AIM Betas and whether we will be releasing betas in the future. I guess it has been made known that some members of our beta team were impacted by last month’s changes. In my 8+ years working on AIM we always have done betas and I can assure you this will continue. We will still be getting your feedback via the usual channels, beta.aol.com, my blog, forums, and Report-A-Bug. In fact we are working on a release right now, and it will makes it way out the door very soon. I encourage everyone if they have questions to leave comments below or send me an IM using AIM Wimzi on the right side of the screen. Next week we will have some Open AIM news. Have a great weekend, and enjoy Super Bowl 41.5 tomorrow.