The Open AIM software development kit and support website moved into the public view Monday morning, and third-party developers have begun downloading the SDK to give it a try.
Jamie Odell, AIM director of product management, and Justin Uberti, chief architect for AIM, discussed the launch of Open AIM and the AIM Developer website. They noted in an interview that the newly available SDK for developers would continue to be updated with new material for third-party developers.
While AOL has been involved in instant messaging and development for several years, this new initiative really picked up steam in earnest over the past couple of years.
Open AIM offers developers the kind of access that coders have with Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and eBay in being able to build third-party applications using web services and APIs offered by a powerhouse web presence.
Perhaps that makes it fitting that one of the first services AOL made available was AIM Presence. It is simple enough for a user to place on a site, just one line of HTML code to insert. Users who want to play with an XML interface can add more metadata to AIM Presence for their sites.
With the release of the AIM Triton beta client, developers now can play with it through the full AIM SDK available from the Open AIM site. Developers can build a custom AIM client or integrate a client into another application.
The SDK should help AIM maintain what has been a significant presence in the global enterprise market. AOL said it connects to more than 75 percent of those enterprise users.
Developers can access Triton’s codebase and build plugins and mashups using the code. A Plugin Gallery will be one of the services AOL makes available from the Open AIM site.
I asked the AIM folks about measuring the success of the program. They aren’t looking for any hard ceiling or milestone to be hit. But if developers build applications that begin to hit the 250,000/day or 2,000,000/month invocation usage limits of a Deployment Key (the Development Key permits 500 daily invocations), AOL will be very happy to see that level of use of a third-party project.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
