AimWimzi and the Prisoner of MeeboMe

So LIEK on Friday, Aim Wimzi came all up into MeeboMe’s face and said
"AND WHAT! "
MeeboMe wuz like,
"SO WHAT! I STILL GOT BETTER CHATROOMS AND BETTER AIM THAN YOU!"

Thus starts the new chapter of AOL’s magical journey to steal everyone else’s ideas. Maybe they thought of it first but took too long to deploy… Or maybe they…. nevermind.

A big blow to Meebo’s MeeboMe service was quietly released on Friday, allowing users to place an Aim Widget on their site. AimWimzi is actually derived from Aim Whimsicals. In the beginning, Aim Whimsicals let users sign onto your website using their own AIM screen name. You could give them their own full buddy list, or let them IM you directly. It wasn’t really practical, only because most people would still just use Aim 5.9. In the meantime MeeboMe’s service let anyone place a widget on their website, allowing people to IM directly to you. The only drawback to MeeboMe was that you had to login to Meebo.com. Since Meebo doesn’t have an offline client, it didn’t make much sense to use it either. You’d have to go to the website just to sign on, and leave it open until your finished. So it was a good opportunity for AOL to strike back at this weak point to create AimWimzi. Very practical in that all you have to do is sign onto Aim from anywhere, and your instantly logged in from the widget. You can change and customize the widget on the fly without needing to repost the code. However, you’ll have to manually edit the size if your going to change it.

Aim Wimzi works by creating a random screen name for the visitors of your site. Only they can IM you first. Your buddy list will show a new category with the title of the widget, and automatically updates (although slowly) whenever a visitor has the widget enabled. You can remain anonymous by typing a customized Display Name. You don’t have to worry about random people IMing your real screen name every minute like they do to me.

Aim Wimzi does have a bug where if you access it too many times, it will display a message saying your Appkey is missing. If you do see this message, don’t worry, its only happening to you, not your other visitors.

What will AOL copy next? You know AOL there is one place you don’t have dominance over, WAP. Yes thats right WAP! We need an AIM Wap Client for anyone with a cellphone, not just T-moblie customers. Lets get rid of txt message AIM and move it all onto the Web. Make a lovely FREE BREW application for Verizon customers and we’ll have a deal! You can even put ads in it too.