San Francisco — Just a day after Google integrated its Gmail with a social networking feature, the newly-independent AOL Inc. unfurled a beta version of its AIM instant messaging client that connects with Facebook’s Chat service. The partnership that will allow millions of AIM users to send and receive instant messages to their Facebook friends, and chat across the Web environments who also become part of AIM’s “Buddy” lists.
The announcement emphasizes the growing competition between Google, the Internet’s leading company, and Facebook, which recently passed AOL to rank third in Web traffic.
AOL said in a blog post it is adding its Lifestream social networking feature, launched last year empowering AIM users to aggregate updates and feeds from social networking sites including Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube and AOL’s own Bebo.
Lifestream already delivers many of the same services and social features that Google is now introducing with Google Buzz, said Brad Garlinghouse, a former Yahoo executive who now leads AOL operations in Silicon Valley.
AOL is hoping that its latest advancement will substantially expand its AIM user base beyond its current total of 17 million users. The move by AOL also backs up Gartner’s prediction that email and social networks will continue to become increasingly tightly integrated.
“The rigid differentiation between e-mail and social networks will erode. E-mail will take on many social attributes, such as contact brokering while social networks will develop richer e-mail capabilities,” said Matt Cain, research vice president at Gartner.
AIM is the first major instant messaging service to incorporate with Facebook’s new interface. “In today’s online environment, you cannot be competitive without being open and allowing partners, developers and consumers to leverage your technology,” said Ethan Beard, Facebook’s director of platform marketing.
Moreover, Garlinghouse said the Facebook move is part of AOL’s “renewed focus on the consumer” as the Web firm’s new management plots a new direction in 2010. AOL became independent after spinning off from its corporate marriage with Time Warner Inc.
“We had lost our way,” Garlinghouse said.
This new partnership is again points to a very beneficial thing not only for AIM users but also for Facebook users. Facebook users who spend almost the entire day logged on to Facebook now do not need to log out in order to chat with their friends who are using AIM.
“While e-mail is already almost amply penetrated in the corporate space, we expect to see exorbitant growth rates for sales of premises- and cloud-based social networking services.”
This partnership will be surely beneficial to both parties. Facebook has 400 million users and AIM has 17 million!
About 70 percent of AOL users also use Facebook. The integration with Facebook, Garlinghouse said, “is a sign of where AOL is heading” as it tries to restore its reputation as an Internet innovator.