AOL opens up AIM? That’s what the press release says. A lot of people use AIM and ICQ, I wonder why doesn’t this include ICQ? See the AIM developer area for the nuts and bolts on the situation, but it looks to me like presence, plugins and custom AIM clients will all be possible.

I collected a key for a presence indicator for one of our sites and noticed there were two terms of service agreements. Nothing like a paper trail. Developers need to specifiy the following (emphasis mine):

If your Site is located within a proprietary, nonpublic network, you must grant AOL access to such Site for periodic reviews, upon request by AOL. If you would like to use or access the Presence Tools through any means other than a Site, including but not limited to any application that is installed upon and/or runs on an end user’s computer or other hardware (a “Client”), you must obtain AOL’s prior written consent, and may direct any such inquiry to AIMCommercial@aol.com.”

Now what if you want to add AIM presence indicators inside several different third party sites (you need to list them all?), or make available so others can copy/paste code to add to their sites? Looks to me like this won’t be possible. Looks like those developers would need to email them as they could see that as “commercial” usage? I love the word “open” which in many cases for developers carries the word “except for these conditions.” Grrr.

Steve Rubel thinks this is a great thing and is “really excited about this marketing opportunity.” Clearly he’s taking the bait. Some of his readers however are not, see the comments. One of my favorite comments there is by Paul Fabretti who wisely points out: “I can’t quite see the benefit of this Steve, other than to AOL. What possible benefits could an external developer add to the AIM that there isn’t already around amyway?”

Bingo.

The big print giveth, the small taketh away is right. It’s cool that they want to open things up, but let’s be real here. A lot of these supposed ‘open’ agreements — and not just from AOL but from many vendors — are closed for activities that involve any sort of revenue for the developers. What these companies should be promoting is “open for non-commercial use only.” Of course that doesn’t sound as appealing, hence the asterisk in this post’s title.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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