San Francisco — In an attempt to lure users from other chat service, Google and AOL have advanced their instant messaging partnership to a new level with absolute interoperability among AIM, Gmail and Google Talk.
Although a little old, AIM still revels as a popular instant messenger client and Google is keen to make sure that its Google Talk service can take advantage of its user base. But even if you are a Gmail, Orkut, iGoogle, or Android user, you can now effortlessly chat with friends and coworkers who use the popular AIM instant messaging service even if you do not have an AIM account.
Interestingly, the two services have been linked since 2007 — such as Gmail users have long been able to access their AIM account through Google Talk, but there was a fairly crucial barrier in that the AIM could only work within Gmail, meaning that none of Google’s other communication products could use the service.
The juggling of two IM accounts has limited the usefulness of AIM within Gmail. However, yesterday, Google announced in a blog post that this problem has now been resolved, and Google is now using a new capability from AIM called “federation.“
Initially, the major change is that AIM users can now easily communicate with their Google contacts and vice versa. Federation works both ways; AIM users can also now add Gmail users to their buddy lists. Also, this works no matter which client a person is using, so they can IM a friend that uses AIM via Google Talk, Gmail, iGoogle, Orkut or any other Gtalk client.
Furthermore, Gmail users will now see a pop-up asking them to add their AIM buddies directly to Gtalk. Users will have to add @aol.com to the end of the AIM contact they are trying to add to make it work (e.g. screenname@aol.com).
“From the beginning, we designed Google Talk using open standards so that you could connect to your friends and family using any chat product, making communication as easy as possible,” said product manager Matthew Leske on the Gmail blog.
In addition to appending AIM contacts directly through Gmail, Google has removed the ability to sign in via AIM. This would normally be a problem for Google users that have hundreds of AIM contacts in their Gmail chat client, thus AOL has created a two-step process that allows Gmail users to import all their AIM contacts at once.
“A few years back, we announced our partnership with AOL which made it possible for people to chat with AIM users right from inside Gmail.”
“Today, we are happy to report that AOL has now made it possible to chat with AOL contacts across a variety of Google services: not just Gmail, but also iGoogle, Orkut, and Google Talk on Android phones.”
Anyway, the modifications may not affect users instantly, but they are big for sure. AOL and Google have tons of instant messenging users each. Integrating their user bases makes both chat platforms far more useful, which could help them fend off competition. They need to worry about Facebook, whose FbChat service has ballooned in popularity, and Skype, which has more than 500 million users and is now owned by Microsoft.
Nevertheless, somehow, the move seems to offer less AIM integration than before, but it makes sense for Google to try to get more people on Google Talk, rather than serve as an AIM client. But for those who never created an AIM account, it will be a useful communication option.