First Look: AIM Pages

I spent an hours or so fooling with the new AIM Pages beta, creating a new stoweboyd page. The idea is straightforward: you build an online digitial profile using various predefined modules. Here's the first go from me:

Note that the two RSS modules -- one for /Message and another for Ambivalence -- are stuck in "loading..." status. I was told that a server may be down, or just dragging because demand is so high today. That explains, also, why the What's New area doesn't show anything new, although all of it is new. And I couldn't get back into the editor to do a screengrab on the modules for the same reason: once I tried to get back in, the editor brought up a blank template, almost as if I had deleted everything.

I guess we will have to give the team there a few days for things to settle down.

At first look, it's an easy to use and obviously expandable tool. There are You Tube modules, and I bet iTunes and other music modules. I wnadered around, and its easy to see how people could use a social network like this to find people with common interests and geography, and hook up (a la MySpace).

We'll have to see how the integration with AIM works out. Turns out that only those members of your buddylist who have created their own AIM Page will show on your AIM Page in a buddy module. So while the two are related, the AIM Page buddylist is a subset of AIM's. If AIM Page users want to, they can expose an "add me to your buddylist" on their Page, so in that instance AOL is leveraging the poser of IM. But if people opt not to do that, AIM Pages may not have much of AIM in them.

[Update: Michael Arrington has a review, here.]

tags: aim+pages, first+look, aol, myspace, social+networking, rss+feeds

Comments

[J. Botter]

For a first go, AIM Pages is pretty nice. Everything's not working correctly at all times, but it's really nice to be able to just drag and drop all that stuff in there.

I wish I was a developer so I could make more modules, though.