AOL gives out $100,000 in prizes to AIM plugin coders
AOL is getting serious about opening up its popular instant messenger application. A few months ago the company launched the Open AIM initiative, making available the APIs and documentation developers need to add AIM features to third party applications or to develop third party plugins for AIM. Now AOL, which happens to be this blog's parent company, has announced the winners of a $100,000 design competition. Winning entries included applications that let you:
- Instantly translate messages from one language to another
- Preview an URL in an IM by hovering your mouse over it
- Manage your RSS feeds from within AIM
- Share your desktop with another AIM user
- Convert text-based instant messages to speech
Nine winners scored $10,000, while 20 more winners got $500 prizes. You can check out a list of winner and see all the submissions at the TopCoder contest page.
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So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
