the latest happenings from our Dulles Campus

This week we released two must-have applications that run on the iPhone and iPhone 3g: an AIM client and AOL Radio. They’ve both been generating a lot of buzz as some of the best free iPhone applications at launch. AOL has been working hard to create great mobile experiences such as the main portal that was revamped last year, AOL MyMobile and the launch of a number of free mobile applications.

Let’s take a look at each of these new iPhone apps or you can learn more at AOL Mobile

AIM for iPhone

Aim is the first IM client for the iPhone and offers full IM functionality in a handset version. We’ve been working with Apple on this one for a while and demoed an early version at Macworld this year. We’re now offering free IM clients for both iPhone and for the Windows Mobile platforms, so that you can access them directly without paying any monthly subscription charges to your mobile carriers.

AOL Radio for iPhone

AOL Radio provides access to hundreds of local radio stations on your iPhone through a partnership with CBS. Since the quality of music is adjusted based on your bandwidth, you’ll get the best sound with 3G connectivity.

Note: Though I work at AOL, the views expressed here are my own thank-you-very-much.

Today the AIM team announced the Beta release of AIM Express 7 web instant messenger client. This version was built in Flash to create a really fantastic user experience. Here’s the release:

Help us test drive AIM’s new and improved Instant Messenger for the Web, called AIM Express. Now you can chat with your friends anywhere you have an internet connection - from the library, while traveling or working, or even visiting grandma’s house. We’ve made some updates from the older version…it’s lightweight, easy to use, and accessible world-wide. Now, in a single window, you can view your Buddy List® and chat with your friends directly from your browser.

I checked it out and was very impressed by how clean and user-friendly the interface is and how fast the flash was. It loads into your buddy list and lets you switch between chats using tabs and you don’t even need to open multiple windows.

Disclosure: I do work at AOL, but these views are my own and not those of my employer.

Only one more day until Ubuntu 8.04: Hardy Heron is released. I’ve been playing with 8.04 since it was in beta and overall it’s a very solid Operating System. If you’re interested to check it out, you don’t actually have to install it to your machine. You can either run a Ubuntu Live-Cd or use Wubi to install Ubuntu as a software package under Windows.

Yes, you read that correctly… Via Wubi you can install Ubuntu as a Windows program without the need to repartition a harddrive and it will also update the NT Loader automatically. Check out the Wubi homepage if you want to know more.

More details after the jump: (more…)

This week AOL launched a mobile web gaming portal in conjunction with Cellufun. These are WAP-based mobile games for the http://wap.aol.com/games targeting the casual gamer. Games include Call of the Pharaoh, Space Wars, Ice Fishing, and many popular card and board games. This is one of the first instances I’ve seen of ad-supported games on the mobile phone. I think it will get even more interesting as mobile web browsers become provide better AJAX and Flash support, but this is an excellent start.

This afternoon I had a chance to listen to a talk by Thomas Vander Wal, the innovator that coined the term folksonomy circa 1994. He speaks on social media and two of the key factors that he looks at are folksonomy and circles of sociability and does workshops diving in depth on a particular service or platforms. Thomas does a really good job of breaking down the components of any social media site, whether a social network, bookmarking service or social news. The most fundamental concept of social media is what he calls ‘object oriented sociality.’ That is the concept that media sites are really about people and some sort of object whether it’s a link, a profile or other media.

One of the exercises that he’ll do in evaluating a social service is look at the difference user perspectives and levels of engagement. It’s important to evaluate your service from the perspective of the casual user and the contributor, the newbie and the third-party developer to see how usable your service is to these different communities. The level of engagement comes down to turning newbies into casual users and casual users into contributors.
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The MyMobile application is AOL’s answer to the Yahoo Go mobile application that allows you to access many services from one downloaded application. It runs on Windows Mobile Smartphones and Pocket PCs and gives you access to your email, AIM and many other services. AOL Mymobile is currently in private beta and may allow public testing as soon as the next few weeks.

The interface is fairly similar to Yahoo Go and you switch services by rotating through a menu at the bottom. MyMobile includes the following services: AIM, Mail, Contacts, Mapquest, Search, Cityguide, Pictures, Sports, Weather and News. This is impressive since Yahoo Go 2.0, the latest for release for my HTC Wizard, does not include Yahoo Messenger. (more…)

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This morning AOL CEO Randy Falco announced that AOL is acquiring Bebo, the third largest social network behind Myspace and Facebook. With over 3.5 monthly unique viewer, Bebo is the number one social network in the UK and New Zealand.

Bebo resides in a space between Myspace and Facebook in that it is inclusive of teens and college students. It also strikes a nice balance between the rigid design of Facebook and the garbled mess of Myspace in look and feel. Bebo allows users to skin their profiles in order to add their own personal touch, and provides an infrastructure for applications that keeps profiles from becoming too jumbled. Bebo is also a member of the OpenSocial Alliance, which means that they will be able to take advantage of many cross platform applications and a huge developer network.

The question around social network sites in 2008 is whether they can sustain growth. (more…)

Last week the AIM product design team launched a new site called Pixnay. The idea of a social voting site like Hot or Not has been around for a while, but this application takes a slightly different approach and makes the process more social. Pixnay shows you two pictures at a time and asks you to vote between the two of them. This gives more context to the votes and they did a fantastic job designing it.

When you click on one of the two pictures you’ll see a blue circle drawn around it. Then you can also see the user stats and what percentage of the Face Offs that they won. Plus you can just use your existing AIM account rather than signing up for yet another site.

Check it out and send in a photo, that way we can make sure it doesn’t degenerate into a game of “Either, Or.” Screenshot after the Jump

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Today AOL announced a Native and fully supported AIM client, the first officially supported IM client for the iPhone. This comes on the heels of the OpenAIM 2.0 announcement yesterday. Native applications mean no more breaking your phone or having to stay online to receive instant messages.

The engineers have been working around the clock to release this application in time for todays press conference and demonstrated a live chat on stage at the iPhone SDK release press conference. I’ll get screenshots and a review out as soon as I can get my hands on them!

This morning AOL is announcing the release of OpenAIM 2.0 to the developer community. Developers will now have access to a number of AOL provided libraries and documentation on our proprietary OSCAR protocol. This will make it easier than ever to integrate AIM into both desktop clients and web sites.

In addition, we also announced the OpenAIM Developer Challenge through Topcoder. We’ve been a sponsor of their annual collegiate challenge, but this is the biggest Topcoder Event we’ve sponsored yet!