25th Jun 2003
IMlets (or, “What” am I talking to?)
Spotted on an O’Grady’s PowerPage story, a new service from the fine Wall Street Journal folks …
Got AOL Instant Messenger? If so, send WSJOnline a message. You can get news and stock quotes within AIM. It looks to still be in beta (I don’t know, I haven’t been a WSJ website subscriber for a while). Nonetheless, it is cool to be able to do this via instant messaging, and you can see where this is going.
Another AIM-bot (this one Jabber-based) is detailed at MudLondon, which is up sporadically. That one allows you navigate The Capital by Tube. Real World URLs (shops, pubs, etc.) crop up by proximity. MudLondon is done by jo walsh (jo doesn’t do Capitalization :-)
Since AIM is so prevalent [1], I expect that this is just the tip of the iceberg. Lots of AIMlets are going to start cropping up. It’s not a stretch at all for me to put it into FlexiPhoto (give a keyword, I will kick back a thumbnail you can click on for a larger version in a browser). I love the idea of instant messaging taking off in new directions (such as iChat AV, and these new services).
[1] did you know you can just run a Java version, which doesn’t require an explicit download and installation?
