What happened to AIM-Google interoperability?

by Jordan Running Dec 21st 2006

Today marks the one-year anniversary of what could have been a great milestone between AOL and Google."'Could have been'?" you ask? Well, one year ago today the two internet giants announced a $1 billion deal that put 5% of ~~Google~~ AOL in ~~AOL~~ Google's pocket. One result they promised was that the companies' instant messaging products, Google Talk and AIM, would be interoperable, allowing Google Talk users to send messages to AIM users and vice versa. And, as Steve Rubel points out, one year ago to the day, that interoperability is nowhere to be found.

Rubel speculates that AOL isn't delivering the advertising revenue that Google hoped for, which has put integrations on hold. "After all, why get married if the courtship is rocky?" he says. "It would only upset users if they re-segregated the IM systems." Whatever the cause, it's been a long wait and I hope they haven't decided to scrap the whole thing.

Tags: aim, aol, google, google talk, GoogleTalk, gtalk, im, instant messaging, InstantMessaging, interoperability

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

David said 7:44PM on 12-21-2006

One year *later* to the day.

robotrock said 11:45AM on 12-22-2006

I don't understand where those speculations are coming from. AOL's ad revenue growth was second only to Google's for the last 3 quarters....and even if the ad rev growth had slowed, is that really a reason not to allow GTalk and AIM users from talking to one another?

I think AOL's dragging its feet...have you seen how long it took them to go from aim 5.9 to aim 6.0?...and it doesn't even have feature parity.

Marc said 4:44PM on 12-22-2006

With M$ and Yahoo dancing together in the IM world I am still wondering what happened here.

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