AIM Now (Mostly) Open To Developers
Found on Slashdot on Sunday, 05 March 2006
Today is a historic day at AOL as we announced a software development kit for AOL Instant Messenger. Open AIM will empower you, as the developer, to write custom clients and plugins. For now, lets concentrate on the Open AIM SDK and get into what it can do for you.
We now have a solution to provide all AIM users and consumers to build their own IM clients and to extend the features of Triton via plugins. Of course all of this is free of charge.
Free as in totally limited. If you read their FAQ, you will find for example this: "Developers are not permitted to build Custom Clients that are multi-headed or interoperable with other IM networks". The user license adds more limitations: "Your Plugin shall not block, disable, or otherwise affect any advertising, advertisement banner window", "You may only offer your Plugin for download by users from a fixed HTML website located at a publicly available fixed URL address which you identify" or "You may not deploy or distribute your Plugin to any third party.". And because your development key is used during the connection, they can block your plugin at any time. All this really isn't free.