Tales of a Running Man

Monday, March 14, 2005

AIM Privacy and Slashdot

OK, I am getting tired of hearing about how "The new AIM TOS allows AOL to have all rights to anything you say on IM, AOL reads/stores all your IMs, etc."

I take this kind of personally, because that is not something I would want to be associated with.

First off, that blurb in the TOS only refers to AIM forum posts, not IMs. I agree that it is vague and should be reworded to be clear.
Second, the amount of IM traffic is on the order of hundreds of gigabytes a day. It would be very costly, and we have no desire to record all IM traffic. We don't do it.
Thirdly, if you still don't trust us, we have Direct IM (aka Send IM Image) and Secure IM in all recent versions of the AIM software. In other words, you can send your IMs in such a way that they never go through our servers, and/or are encrypted with industry-standard SSL and S/MIME technology. I know this since I designed these features. There are no backdoors; I would not have permitted any.

I am saying this as a concerned individual, and not as a corporate spokesperson..

Friday, March 11, 2005

Icons for AIM Web Presence Indicator

One thing about the AIM Web Presence Indicator is that it requires you to supply your own image URLs for online and offline. For those who don't want to go poking around looking for little running man graphics, I found these URLs:

http://www.aim.com/remote/gr/MNB_online.gif

http://www.aim.com/remote/gr/MNB_offline.gif

I also found Frank's Icons, a great AIM buddy icon site that not only has a lot of great icons, but allows you to customize the colors and wording on the icon as well. Here's an icon that I made:

Tuesday, March 8, 2005

AIM Web Presence Indicator, Extended

I got some responses to the last post asking if it was possible to do more than just change the image if the user was online or offline. Well, big.oscar.aol.com doesn't know to supply anything other than an image, but it is possible to use Javascript to get the desired result.

I was hoping that the image's "location" property would be set appropriately based on the redirect from big.oscar, but unfortunately that's not the case. So the only thing I could think of was to have a tiny offline image, and use the image's "height" property to tell in the onload handler whether it was the online or offline image that loaded. Fortunately, this worked pretty well. Here's a simple example page that demonstrates this behavior:

<html>
<script language="javascript">
function imgload(e)
{
if (document.getElementById("i").height <= 2)
document.getElementById("s").style.fontStyle = "italic";
}
</script>
<body>
<img id="i" onload="imgload()" border="0" src="http://big.oscar.aol.com/nosuchuser?on_url=http://www.aol.com/aim/gr/online.gif&off_url=http://www.aol.com/aim/gr/offline.gif">
<span id="s">nosuchuser</span>
</body>
</html>

and the output:

nosuchuser

This italicizes the text if the user "nosuchuser" is offline. This is just a simple example, from here you can do lots of things, such as add/change a hyperlink, etc.

Monday, March 7, 2005

AIM Web Presence Indicator

In my next couple posts, I'm going to cover some of the interfaces to the AIM system that exist currently. One such example is the AIM web presence server, AKA big.oscar.aol.com. You can construct an image URL that displays one image if you are online, and another image if you are offline. Here's an example:

Note that if you are not using the "Allow everyone to see me" privacy mode, you will always show up as "offline" in this indicator.

You can also get clever and link the image to an aim GoIM URL, so that anyone who clicks on your icon will be able to easily send you an IM.

And here's it in action:

Sunday, March 6, 2005

DoorManBot

Matthew Goldstein wrote in about DoorManBot, a bot that allows users to submit IMs for offline users that will be delivered the next time that user signs on. Looks pretty useful. http://doorman.info/?page=info

Monday, February 28, 2005

AIM Plug-Ins

Well, now that it's been made public, I can start to talk about it... the next version of the AIM client (which will be a BIG step forward from the 5.x series) will have support for 3rd party plugins.

The mechanism will be COM/IDispatch, so any standard development tool can be used to author these plugins.

The API will be very rich and support presence, IMing, file transfer, audio/video, and more, including the ability to set up peer-to-peer sessions with another user who has your plugin.

We've been thinking of some cool plug-in ideas, but I'm sure that the AIM community is where the best ideas will come from.

AOL Opening Up Community

Some press on some of the stuff we are working on... http://www.betanews.com/article/AOL_Opens_Up_its_AIM_Community/1109603183