AOL's much-talked-about social networking site AIM Pages launched today in beta form at AIMPages.com. Logging in with your AIM screen name takes you to the profile editor, which has a neat drag-and-drop Ajax interface. By default your AIM Pages profile has a few "modules" like the obligatory photo and "About Me" box, and you can add other modules like RSS feeds, photo tickers from Flickr or AOL, and even games, by dragging them to the column and position you would like them to appear. Each module has "Edit" and "Style" buttons for changing their settings and appearances. It also has more than 75 built-in themes which range from clean to cutesy to garish, and after choosing a theme you can further customize it. I've only used AIM Pages for about a half hour so far, but my earliest impressions are that it's a whole lot better than MySpace (though my MySpace experience is similarly limited), the integration with AIM is great but could be better, the Ajax is cool (and occasionally useful) but lacks the "snappiness" I've come to expect from Ajax apps. I'm not sure that AIM Pages is ready for the MySpace crowd yet (think Microsoft-grade beta, not Google beta), but there's one thing that, as a web geek, I'm very excited about: the open API. "Open" is not a word we tend to associate with AOL (and I write for them!), but for awhile now AOL has been running a site called I Am Alpha which is a testbed and resource for people who want to build modules for what turned out to be AIM Pages. I haven't attempted to create a module myself yet (and it's unclear what the protocol is for actually getting a module you made into AIM Pages), but the documentation is free and open, which opens up possibilities for AIM Pages that I'm sure even its developers haven't thought of.

The blogosphere is replete today with chatter about AIM Pages. For more discussion, take a look at Michael Arrington's less-than-glowing first impressions at TechCrunch, some optimistic views from Richard MacManus' Read/Write Web and J. Botter, and more commentary from Stowe Boyd and Vecosys.

Today social networking juggernaut MySpace quietly launched its long-rumored instant messaging service, MySpaceIM. Fox Interactive product manager Kareem Mayan has the scoop and screenshots on his blog. MySpaceIM is a desktop client for Windows that has a pretty minimal interface and looks pretty vanilla in terms of features. It does most of what you'd expect of an IM client like text formatting, emoticons, history, and so on, but don't expect anything fancy like VoIP. MySpaceIM is ad-supported, with a small advertisement sitting at the bottom of the contact list. According to Mayan, the only default contact is the ubiquitous Tom and your other MySpace friends can be added through a web-based interface. There's an argument to be made for automatically populating it with all of your friends, but on the other hand some people might prefer to exercise different levels of discretion for MySpaceIM than for MySpace proper. The timing of MySpaceIM's launch is interesting considering that AOL, itself a huge player in IM (and this blogger's employer), made news last night when paidContent.org posted a screenshot of its MySpace-alike AIM Pages. To download the beta version of MySpaceIM, head over to MySpace.

Over at TechCrunch Michael Arrington has posted a nice big screenshot of AIM Pages, the much-talked-about social networking site (a.k.a. "MySpace Killer") from this blogger's employer, AOL. It's certainly prettier than MySpace, but that's not saying much, and there's no word yet on how much customization/uglification will be possible. Arrington also speaks with AOL's Kerry Parkins about AIM Pages' features, such as Flickr and AOL Music modules and its publishing tools which "make the process more simple and the results more attractive." I think that AIM Pages actually has a chance of unseating MySpace, or at least taking a reasonable chunk out of its market, solely by virtue of having an immense pre-installed userbase in the form of the millions of people who already have an AIM account. The challenge for me will be deciding which of my three screen names to use.

Update: The screenshot and interview are originally from paidContent.org, which has more info on AIM Pages.