Monthly Archives: October 2007

Happy Halloween

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For a while people have been asking me for access to the presentations I have done over the years. Well, they were posted internally at AOL for the past few months, but now that I have the new blog, I am posting them publicly. You will find all the talks I have given here in 2007. You will notice that I will also be taking all the code samples that I posted on the old blog here and the plugins link will point to the AIM Gallery. To find this page later, there is a link in my blog roll section.

One thing that I have not blogged about but definitely deserves some attention is AIM Tunes. We included a plugin in the AIM 6.5 release we did at the beginning of the month that allows you to you to listen to music from your buddies. It’s as simple as that. Check out http://x.aim.com/music for more information! We put together a little tutorial to show you how easy it is to use. From a technical perspective, the plugin takes advantage of AIM’s Open API using IAccCustomSession interface. As always we love to get the feedback from you guys on how we are doing.

AIM Call-Out

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Now available for all AIM users is a new feature entitled AIM Call Out. We have made it easier than ever to make phone calls to phone numbers all over the world; 200 countries in fact. Instead of paying a monthly fee, AIM Call Out allows you to pay as you go. Rates vary from country to country, and you need AIM 6.5 to use AIM Call Out. Of course calling either audio or video from one AIM client to another AIM client (PC-to-PC) is still free. We even have partnered up with a couple of headset manufactures to provide high quality audio output devices. I actually have been using it on my trip here in Tel Aviv and think the quality and ease to use is great.

Speaking of Israel here is a picture I took today watching the sunset on the beach.

Sunset in Tel Aviv

AIM Dashboard

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Soon after we launched AIM 6.5 we launched the AIM Dashboard. This web page is an aggregate view of your status messages and status messages of your buddies. It also displays an aggregate view of updates your buddies have made to things like Buddy Info, Pictures, even Flickr. When we launched Buddy Feeds last year the best way of viewing the buddy feed is by clicking on the buddy feed indicator on the buddy list. Now this web page will provide a clear and concise picture of things you and your buddies want to share with each other. Here is my AIM Dashboard where you can view what I have been up too. You can manage the Buddy Update settings and what your buddies can see about you, such as away message updates or status message update, by navigating to the settings page. If you are a user of AIM MusicLink the current song that gets stored as the status message is now kept in the history view of your Dashboard.

The journey to Tel Aviv is going well. One funny thing to share with you about the trip, on the way to Tel Aviv from Frankfurt, Germany, our Lufthansa plane had to restart the in-flight video system at our seats. Sure enough we saw the boot screen and the operating system for Lufthansa is Windows CE. Here is a picture of what we saw:

Lufthansa Inflight A/V System

AIM Gallery and Profile Questions

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A few weeks ago we launched AIM Gallery. This site is the repository where you can find all the OpenAIM plugins, clients, bot, mashups that 3rd party developers are building. Instead of hosting my stuff on my blog, I can now push it to the Gallery. Of course we built a feedback mechanism into the Gallery so you can rank and comment.

I have been reading the feedback on the profile problems that have been reported. I need a little bit more follow up to understand what is happening. For the person who signs on at work and loses the profile from home, are both clients AIM 6.5? We made a change to the way profiles are handled by the client and how they interact with the AIM Cloud. Profiles now are stored on the host so when you sign offline the profile is still accessible via your AIM Page, etc. In old AIM clients, this was not the case. I am getting our QA to just sanity check a few things, during development there was a bug similar to what you guys are describing. We have discovered one issue, where if you sign on with AIM 6.5 and set a profile, sign off and then sign on, say at work with AIM 5.9, sign off, then sign on with AIM 6.5 back at home, if you view your profile it will still be there, but if you edit your profile it may be blank. As we get more details I will let you know. 🙂

Tomorrow I am off across the Atlantic to see ICQ in Tel Aviv. I will post a few pictures on the blog. Until then, have a good start to the weekend.

AIM 6.5

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AIM 6.5 BLThe past few weeks have been a barn burner. We released so many different things it makes me wonder what are we not doing. In this blog post I am going to focus solely on the AIM 6.5 release. Those who have found it at aim.com (and there are many people who already have) can attest this release continues to positive trend of improvements to the client and the Open AIM platform.

The difference between AIM 6.1 and AIM 6.5 is quite significant. We have tried to bubble up some existing technology to give it more prominence in the client. For example, the ability to send SMS text from AIM to your buddy’s cell phone is much easier, and is of course free in the US. We also now support status messages in the buddy list. Status has been part of the platform for a few years, if you have ever used iChat on a Mac you would have seen their implementation of it. I used the status API in the AIM MusicLink plugin I wrote as well as TwitterMan where you can set your status in AIM and Twitter at the same time. Status is a great way to share with your buddies what you are up too.

In AIM 6.5 we of course have full support for expressions and we made a bunch of good improvements to audio and video.

There are a few other features in this release, but I am saving those for their own blog posts.

IM Window

What’s Old is New

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AIM is still here, as am I. I have been wanting to relaunch my blog for about 6 months, that is why I have been having trouble blogging for the past few months. So this is the relaunch, I am calling it Greg’s Mind, because, the blog will share what I am minding. If you want to go back and look at the old blog, it can be found here.

Of course we will cover all things AIM and Open AIM related, but also some great stuff happening out in the social media and networking world. I may even have a pop culture reference or two, to share.

We have obviously been doing a lot of stuff over the past few weeks, since I last blogged and I will be catching up on those as well as sharing with you some of the things we are working on. So stay tuned, and welcome to the new blog.