AIM Triton Beta 2 is out!

Quite a busy day. Download at http://beta.aol.com./projects/tritonbeta.

AIM profile size increased

One of the most-requested AIM improvements has finally occurred - the AIM "profile" size has been increased from 1K to 2K. Away message size is increased to 2K as well, although you will have to use AIM Triton to set a > 1K away message.

Detecting AIM from a web page

One of the engineers on my team, Greg Cypes, gave me some HTML that can be used on a web page to detect whether AIM is installed. Really simple stuff that can be easily integrated into almost any webpage. You can check it out at this link, do "View Source" to see the few lines of Javascript that do the actual detection. Unfortunately, it doesn't yet work with AIM Triton, although I am sure we will solve that before it is done.

Update: May 25, 2005 3:58 PM EDT
OK, I was wrong. The AIM detect script I posted works with IE and Netscape 4.7, but with Mozilla/Firefox, it doesn't detect AIM 5.9. Somehow the setup of the application/x-aim MIME type got busted in AIM 5.9 (maybe also in 5.5). Hopefully we can get this fixed for the AIM 5.9 refresh.

AIM Mail is out!

More good stuff today! AIM Mail, free email for AIM users, launched today at http://mail.aol.com! Simply log in with your existing AIM screenname to get a free 2 GB aim.com mailbox with:
• AOL's excellent spam and anti-virus protection
• An awesome web front end with search
• Or, if you want to use a mail client, IMAP access
• Single Log-on - logging into AIM allows lets you seamlessly login to AIM Mail
• AIM presence integrated into email so you can see if the sender or recipients are online
• AOL's "Unsend" and "Message Status" features
• And more!

It's a great product! Check it out at http://mail.aol.com.

250 Buddies!

I've said it before - there's going to be a lot of great stuff coming out of AOL this summer. Today's improvement is a new buddylist limit of 250 buddies per list (up from 200).

Also some folks have been asking about AIM Triton: is it AIM 6, or is it part of a software suite? The answer is: both. It's the successor to AIM 5.9; the latest AIM 5.9 version with AOL Browser will be the last version from the AIM 5.9 codebase. AIM 6 is also one of the first of a suite of applications (AOL Browser is another) built on top of our core platform and with our Boxely UI toolkit. I don't know whether AIM 6 will actually be called "AIM 6" when it has its final release - that's something the marketing people will decide.