San Francisco — AOL’s instant messaging service (AIM) striving to keep pace with the growing trends does not want to be defeated by the web’s latest and most popular social networking and publishing tools, so it has decided to join them — on Tuesday announced a major update by integrating the AIM Lifestream application that lets people update, follow and reply to messages on modern social services Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Flickr, and Delicious.
“It is lighter, swifter and cleaner,” said Jeremy Rephlo, director of product manage for AIM.
Additional integration into instant messaging of AIM Lifestream will display updates from the social feeds referred above and, besides, lets people to post back to the services. The suite of products, including clients for Macintosh and iPhone apps, and a Web client, will be launched on September 22. The current Lifestream Web site shows the development of the project so far. The finished version will bring instant messages into the mix.
But there’s more to the new AIM than social networks. Instead of simple private pings between two AIM users, users can read Facebook streams on their iPhone client or desktop app, and reply, with their responses showing up immediately. Two tabs have been added to the client: “Lifestream” and “Me”. AOL also included threaded “one-to-many” online conversations allowing for group chat, and allows users to automatically cross-post their status, send pictures, videos and Web links. Users can also send SMS messages to friends.
Nevertheless, AOL wishes AIM to become the dashboard for the nets’ most popular social networks. The news comes amid flourishing interest and popularity of social networks as well as tools to let users better manage them.
Naturally, photos can be uploaded from the iPhone to the LifeStream tab and by extension to the other services. A total of 40 can be accessed.
Here at the TechCrunch50 conference, AOL representatives put the new IM through its paces, sending updates to different social networks, sending pictures, Web links via IM from a Mac, to a Blackberry, iPhone and notebook computer.