Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Quietly, just before the holiday weekend last week, AOL released the AIM Triton 1.5 Preview.  It seems that nobody noticed. There were all of six blog entries about it last week. I guess the blogging world was heading off to go camping on Thursday afternoon.  Or maybe, the AIMers need some extra help from Andy Abramson…

The big story with this release is integration.

1. AIM Phoneline is now part of Triton.  This is AIM’s free phone service for incoming calls, which can be converted to a service that can make and receive calls for a low monthly fee.  It’s super easy to get set up.
2. The AIM team has also done some work to integrate with AIM Pages.  It now lets you propogate your buddy updates to your AIM page, and subscribe to changes on friends pages.  This isn’t surprising, as MSN has had similar capabilities for a while. 
3. AIM also now includes a video module that can serve up on demand video clips.  It shows AIM the latest AIM video clips.  What I’d really like would be something like You-Tube in this window. 
4. They’ve also, more intriguingly, built a gadgets and plugins interface.  Included with the download is a location plugin, but there’s a page of additional gadgets you can check out.  It’s slim pickings at the moment, but if AOL can build a developer community around this component, AIM will have a very large competitive advantage. 

Triton is definitely showing AIM’s platform aspirations.  Buried in Triton are a full set of call control APIs as well.  AOL is clearly seeking to establish AIM as the integration platform for desktop media applications.

Phea Duch, one of the founders of wGarage, dropped me an email the other day offering to let me test drive their reverse lookup application for Blackberry.  When you receive a phone call from a number that isn’t in your address book, this little utility lets you perform a reverse lookup on the number, and add it to your address book.  Very slick.  You can see a flash demo here, and the company also offers a trial.

It works well for regular land lines, but because cellular phones have no directory listings, it doesn’t work for those.  But if you’re a Blackberry user looking for a quick and easy way to populate your address book, based on who calls you, this is just the ticket.