A social hub born in the 1990s is finding new life by piggy-backing off today’s ones.
AOL Instant Messaging (AIM) is becoming a proper Twitter and Facebook client, letting you send status updates to both social networks and receive a feed about your friend’s items. Before AIM’s Lifestream service would only let you read updates from the other sites, but you couldn’t post to them. The new features are in a newly-released beta version of the chat client.
A deeper integration with the two other social networks will go a long way toward keeping AIM closer to the center of its users’ attentions. The move should keep other Twitter clients like TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop from stealing away users who might want to broadcast what they’re doing. AIM has been experimenting with lifestreaming for awhile; it acquired SocialThing in 2008 and began testing out a social toolbar for Web sites this year.
Bringing in my Facebook contacts worked just fine, but pulling in my Twitter feeds was a bit more difficult. The product also has streamlined its connection to mobile devices — you can only have one mobile device that receives SMS updates from AIM, and like Twitter, the messages have to be 140 characters long.
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To be honest, I haven’t used AIM regularly in ages, so it was like opening a dusty trunk in the attic full of unexpected contacts from years ago. But AIM still has millions of users, so this integration could easily catapult it to near the top of the Twitter clients list.
