By Nick Patience
Amid all the politicking, America Online Inc has found time to upgrade its instant messaging product to version 3.0 just in time to stop carpers from noticing that it was beginning to look pretty tired when compared to its competitors. Services such as Tribal Voice Inc’s PowWow and Yahoo Inc’s own product have been offering far more functionality than AIM for a while. But in this market, the number of users, rather than functionality is often what makes one IM product more attractive than the others. This will at least be the case until the various vendors agree on interoperability, which has turned into a ‘Microsoft versus AOL’ issue and will probably get resolved using the processes of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
New features in 3.0, which is available for download now, include news and stock tickers, the ability to send an receive graphics representing users in buddy lists and an auto-reconnect feature that is designed to avoid reconnecting after short interruptions to a user’s internet connection. But unlike PowWow and Yahoo, there is no voice messaging this time, and the company will not say when it plans to introduce it, although it seems likely in a later version. There are other features lacking here that others already have, such as synchronization with a calendar and so it would appear that AIM 3.0 still has a way to go to catch up with some of its new competitors.
