AIM 7, a version of America Online's instant-messaging client that can also bring users into Facebook and other social-networking services, will come out next Tuesday.
The update is the most significant new version of AIM in years, company officials said Tuesday in a presentation at the TechCrunch 50 conference in San Francisco. Though the software's user interface is "lighter, faster and cleaner" than in the previous version, they said, the biggest change is Lifestream, a set of features that lets users both view and post status updates and content to a variety of social-networking services from within AIM.
With AIM 7, AOL is boosting the importance of the status updates that users can post below their names for display on buddy lists, while seemingly acknowledging that other companies have grabbed the spotlight on this type of functionality. AOL effectively is providing a front end for third-party services including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Delicious and Digg.
More: http://pcworld.com/article/172062/
The update is the most significant new version of AIM in years, company officials said Tuesday in a presentation at the TechCrunch 50 conference in San Francisco. Though the software's user interface is "lighter, faster and cleaner" than in the previous version, they said, the biggest change is Lifestream, a set of features that lets users both view and post status updates and content to a variety of social-networking services from within AIM.
With AIM 7, AOL is boosting the importance of the status updates that users can post below their names for display on buddy lists, while seemingly acknowledging that other companies have grabbed the spotlight on this type of functionality. AOL effectively is providing a front end for third-party services including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Delicious and Digg.
More: http://pcworld.com/article/172062/