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.