AOL Releases Blog and Instant Messaging Tool

AOL users will now be able to ping their buddy lists when they update their blog. America Online has announced that it will launch a new publishing tool Friday (today) to link a user’s blogging activities with their instant messaging.

The interesting part is the new blog tool will be based on open standards so that developers can use it to create IM-blog modules. AOL — open standards? Who’d have ever thunk it. Shades of things to come perhaps.

The tool is part of AOLs offensive strategy to combat increasing competitive threats from new social networks, such as the popular MySpace.com. AOL is attempting to leverage what Jim Bankoff (executive VP of AOL programming and products) claims is the largest instant messaging network in the industry. That’s the ultimate social network said Bankoff. Connecting content creation with social networking real-time communications — we definitely see that’s where the future is going.

I knew there had to be a catch. I’m not an AOL fan so I won’t be trying it out myself. My crystal ball tells me the competition will be coming out with their own version and I’ll wait for that. In the mean time you can read more about how AOL is turning towards new online video features at Yahoo.

UPDATE: To my surprise I received a comment from Jim Bankoff himself that was later followed up with an email. He reminded me that AOL went free last year and suggested that I should give AOl another chance. After my friendly repartee with Jim I am considering the possibility that it might be time to give AOL a fresh look. Besides, anybody who can put up with my odd sense of humour can’t really be all that bad. So perhaps sometime in the near future Jim might consider granting the Bloke an interview to bring me up to speed with what AOL is up to.

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