Always lovely to see things go in the right direction

[jducoeur]

A brief work burble: AIM has just announced the OpenAIM 2.0 release, and it is *seriously* good news for CommYou. They've removed most of the restrictions on applications interacting with AIM, and they've released new libraries, including a Java library. And they officially are no longer worrying about "multi-headed" clients that talk to other IM systems, which was the only reason I could see why they might not love CommYou.

The implication is that I've kicked up the priority of the CommYou/AIM integration. In practice, this means you'll be able to get notifications about new conversations starting via IM, and you'll be able to specify higher-priority conversations that you want to participate in via IM. I was expecting this to be a hard problem, so I was going to put it off until fairly late, but I think I'm going to try to get it in by the first beta. (Probably 2-3 months from now.) It'll take some tuning to get it to the point where it's not annoying, but I think it's going to be seriously useful once the right levers are in place.

Burble, burble. The project continues to be so big it's a bit intimidating, but things continue to fall into place very nicely. First pre-alpha should be available for friends to poke at a little in a few weeks, and then I think it'll be easier to understand where I'm going with all this...

Comments

License has some nasty requirements, though

[metageek.livejournal.com]

I just saw this, though, which says that the license imposes requirements on features which basically ensure that AOL can make money off of your client.

Re: License has some nasty requirements, though

[jducoeur]

Yeah, I'm going to have to think about how this affects me. Thing is, I'm not building a client -- I'm essentially building a somewhat strange bot. (This was how we phrased it to them at Zingdom, and what I'm doing here is analogous.)

So I'm going to have to read through the license carefully, but there's a good chance that this doesn't apply to me...

Re: License has some nasty requirements, though

[metageek.livejournal.com]

Hmm. My first instinct would be to interpret "client" to mean "anything that connects to the server", which would certainly include a bot.

But you may be right; the license may define "client" differently.

Re: License has some nasty requirements, though

[jducoeur]

The thing is, they have two very distinct categories of products here: "custom clients" and "bots". They are technically related under the hood (indeed, they use the same SDK), but always have been treated separately from a licensing and procedural POV. (Mind, I've got experience here: we spent a good deal of time doing AIM integration at Zingdom.)

So when they say "client", I generally interpret that as "custom client". That also makes sense from a business POV. What they are saying here is that they are considering ads delivered to their end users to be a major revenue source, so they do *not* want people to be migrating to custom clients that evade that revenue -- custom clients must also play the ad-revenue game. But a bot lives at the other end of the connection -- it is delivering *content* to their end users, rather than providing an interface between the users and AIM. So ads are less relevant.

In that respect, CommYou is a "bot" -- a content provider -- rather than a "client" -- a content delivery system. So I *think* the ad rule probably doesn't apply to me. No reason why it would: I'm simply giving them more payload on which they can add ads. But at some point I'll probably need to talk with them about this...

[laurion]

But if you succeed, you have to do the dirty work of displaying ads for AOL. Of course, they're happy to make the money while you take the negative rep.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080305-aols-open-aim-2-0-sdk-license-requires-apps-to-include-ads.html

[jducoeur]

See my above response to metageek. I *suspect* this doesn't apply to me, but it'll need more research...