Category Archives: Open AIM

Live from Web 2.0 in San Francisco

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After last years Web 2.0 Expo where I only saw business development and product management people, I had little hope for Web 2.0 this year to be the technical juggernaut OReilly promised. I am glad I was wrong. This year there have been few, if any, vaporware announcements and developers are all over the place. We continue to see tremendous interest in Open AIM and we have fantastic swag to hand out at our booth in Moscone West.

Yesterday’s keynotes were really quite good. Microsoft showed off Live Mesh, which is very interesting as a content distribution tool and storage backup. If I take a picture on my mobile device from the conference, I can use Live Mesh to share pictures instantly with all of my ‘mesh.’ Mesh will run on XP, Vista, and eventually it will run on mobile devices and Macs. Microsoft, internally, has 6 mobile devices and Mac support working and say it will be released later this year. Clay Shirky spoke about how today’s youth spends their free time and how interacting with entertainment is important for them, not sitting idly in front of the TV. Max Levchin from Slide defended his company’s $500 Million valuation and how Slide is staying ahead of the curve with regards to monetization. He believes business models being used in Asia in the form of micropayments and premium services will be the next phase of Slide and other social network apps revenue streams.

Edwin Aoki spoke in front of 4000 people about Open AIM. He borrowed parts of my talk on the History of Open AIM which is a case study of how and why we opened up our APIs. Edwin did a terrific job and it was awesome to have an audience this size hear about AIM.

New AIM Gallery Apps

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We are starting to see some cool results with the Top Coder Open AIM competition where we are giving $100,000 in prizes and some t-shirts as well. Recent additions to the AIM Gallery include an IM Whiteboard plugin, a very cool mashup that allows you to chat with buddies while watching videos, and a neat bot that tests your skills in math and logic. You can find these submission and a bunch more at gallery.aim.com. The site also is host to many other Open AIM plugins, clients, bots and mashups that the community has built. Check out all these apps and more here.

My Cricket Bot

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For my trip to India I decided I would write a bot that can return the latest Cricket News, Scores and Cricket videos via Truveo Video Search. This is super important today as India is in a test with South Africa. Of course I have no understanding of cricket, though the employees here in BDC are definitely watching closely. The bot was written in C-Sharp, which I maintain as the best way to write a bot. The reason being, you have full access to the Open AIM API, you do not have to worry about deploying the .net framework with the bot, and with C-Sharp you get easy to write code with auto complete via Visual Studio. The bot code is posted here for everyone to check out.

Blogging from Banaglore

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This week I am at our Bangalore Development Center working with all the great people here. I was part of an American Idol style Innovation Competition judging great innovative applications developed and created by engineers, testers, and even project managers.  Hopefully we will see some of these innovations up on the AIM Gallery very soon.  I also have been presenting to the teams out here about how we built the Open AIM APIs and what Open AIM 2.0 is all about. India is truly an amazing place, the people are friendly, the traffic and riding in the car is super scary, and development is happening at a break-neck pace.

Here are few pictures from the trip. Tomorrow I will share a bot I worked on specially for the Bangalore office.

New Java Bot Sample Code

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We will constantly update sample code and projects instead of just waiting for SDK or Web API releases. In the past couple of days we posted on the developer website a full fledge bot written in Java. The bot is capable of communicating with LDAP, MySql, Oracle and Google SOAP API. There are two versions of the program, one which includes access to Google SOAP API for search and spell capabilities and the other which does not include that because apparently if you don’t have an API key now, you may not be able to get one (Google SOAP API). This bot uses an Open AIM development key, and takes advantage of the AIM SDK API. This may be the best example of how to write a bot I have seen for AIM, that is fully documented.

Here is a screen shots of the bot in action:

You can view the entire bot summary here. You can view all our source code here.

The Mashup Camp Redux

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Back in the Valley of Computer Geeks, and I am not ready to see some great innovation this week at MashupCamp 6. As always this camp is at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. With over 400 people expected to attend, the competition for the best mashup should be fierce. If you are going to be around on Monday, check out Lucas McGregor’s talk on Online Storage in an Open Source Community. Lucas is a great advocate and evangelist for XDrive.

I am going to make my first public talk about the changes we made for Open AIM last week on Wednesday at 10:30AM. The talk will deep dive into the code we released and all the improvements we made to make your life as a developer easier when integrating AIM into your own application. I will have the presentation up online afterwards.

I may even have my own mashup to enter in the competition. 😉

Bebo and ILoveIM

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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.

Back from SXSW

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The weekend in Austin was truly fantastic My favorite moments from this year at SXSW:

  • Kevin dyeing his hair blue for International Day of Awesomeness
  • Leah Culver from Pownce saying that secure authentication is unnecessary and slow during the Developer Friendly Web APIs talk on Sunday was comical. Not having SSL auth devalues your site, but more importantly your users, especially sites that screen scrape address books etc.
  • Seeing 300 geeks bowl was truly amazing. The Mapquest team bowled 5 foot bouncers down the lane while other teams bowled in full costume.
  • Learning that teens realize that websites need advertisements to make money was refreshing; but having them view ads that they could care less about is wasteful for all of the web industry. For example, a 16 year old viewing an ad for Miller Lite on NBA.com in between videos is pointless for both Miller and NBA Interactive.
  • Doing an interview with the Download Squad on Open AIM was really great; Grant and team do a fantastic job.
  • RockBand was definitely the game of choice at SXSW, as everyone was rocking out on the trade show floor.
  • Seeing Kal Penn, John Cho, and Neil Patrick Harris talking about Harold and Kumar was hysterical

Will I go back next year? Is there any doubt, SXSWi is truly one of the best weekends of the year, now I just need to find a way to stay for the music.

Bowling For Geeks

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Yesterday was a really exciting day at SXSW. We saw some movie stars, AOL won a prestigious web award, and we took on a bunch of other geeks in a ho-down at the bowling alley. A few years ago, Arrested Development was my favorite show on TV (old episodes can be found on hulu.com), and without a doubt that show launched the career of Michael Cera from Superbad and Juno, and it also reinforced the fact that Jeffery Tambour was one of the best comedic actors around. Today he was at SXSW and it was very cool to meet him.

This evening, Kevin Lawver‘s Ficlets which was nominated for two web awards at SXSW, won the award for site with best CSS. Congrats to Kevin and all the folks who worked on it. For those who do not know, Ficlets is a community short story fiction writing site where stories can be strung together and shared with others.

As the web awards were going on, the Open AIM group here attending the conference went to Bowling For Geeks. In a competition between 50 teams bowling two games each, we came in toward the bottom, but had a lot of fun. The folks here in Austin have been awesome this year in getting out and supporting a lot of causes and organizations (of course free food and drinks never hurt).

Mapping the world at SXSW

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API releases are becoming the norm these days from AOL and today we continued the trend with our friends at Mapquest. The Mapquest platform offers free and flexible APIs that allow developers to build rich multi-media applications using a variety of supported programming languages and environments, including JS, AS3, Flash under JS and XML (FUJAX), Java, C++, .net. Here are a few more details, and make sure to check out the Mapquest development blog for updates:

  • A Rich Mapping Interface for creating Rich Internet Applications with our JavaScript, AS3, or FUJAX APIs:
    • Aerial Imagery and Hybrid Views – Satellite imagery and aerial photography.
    • Smart Rollovers – Rollover windows that adapt their size and positioning on the map based on the content placed in the window.
    • Smooth Zoom – Animated transitions between zoom levels.
    • Globe View – A map of the world presented as an interactive globe.
    • “Flickable” Maps – Maps that continue to pan based on speed and friction settings.
    • Advanced Shape Overlays – Build apps that allow users to create and interact with a variety of overlays on maps.
    • Advanced Map Marker Features – With “declutter mode,” automatically move collided markers (POIs) to alternate positions on the map with a customizable leader line pointing back to their original location.
  • Unlimited Maps – Worldwide: Standard or Tiled.
  • Unlimited Geocoding – Multi-line and Single-line Geocoding, Real-time Batch Geocoding, Reverse Geocoding, Postal Code and Town Geocoding.
  • Unlimited Routing – Point-to-Point, Multi-point or Optimized.
  • Simplified Data Management – MapQuest offers access to simple tools to upload and manage location information to help keep websites accurate and relevant.

After using the Mapquest APIs for a couple of years now with out location services in AIM, I am thrilled by this announcement. Congrats to all the great engineers and product folks at Mapquest that released the most flexible mapping APIs out there.