Gmail: AIM Integration

Google has finally rolled out the long awaited AIM integration into Gtalk, which also means it's become available in Gmail.

In the drop down menu under 'contacts', the option to sign in to AIM is now an option (for some at this point, rolling out to the entire community over time):

The first time through, you have to login to an existing AIM account, or create one:

Then, AIM buddies show in your Gmail contacts list with a tiny AIM icon:

I have only noticed one snag so far, based on next to no use: Feedcrier, the service I use that pushes RSS streams to me via AIM, seems to lose all its links though this latest connection. Here's an iChat and Gmail AIM chat, side by side. Note the links in the iChat in blue:

One headache so far. So I can't close iChat just yet. Anyway, I can access Gtalk chat through the iChat Jabber interface, so I am not really sure which mode I like better, anyway.

[Update: 5 Dec -- The world is getting around to fooling with Gmail's AIM integration, a day after me.

And, by the way, the new group chat feature doesn't work with AIM chats in Gtalk.

]

Comments

[Jevon]

I appreciate having the Gtalk client in GMail when I need it (vacation traveling and you end up at some internet cafe), but for general use, I'll take iChat over it any day.

Now I have to figure out how you got iChat to look so much nicer than the bubbles.

[Adam Kalsey]

That Feed Crier problem is really weird. It appears that gtalk isn't parsing the HTML correctly (or might even be dropping it completely). Feed Crier provides two copies of each alert when it sends it out -- one with HTML and one without. The one without has the URLs of the links inserted right below the titles, so clients that don't understand HTML will show those.

Someone reported that links sometimes don't appear on the T-Mobile Sidekick, so I'm betting if we fix this once, it will fix it everywhere.

I'll see what I can figure out.

I was wondering whether this integration would extend to other GTalk compatible clients like iChat. I take it it doesn't? Granted iChat does support AIM as well as GTalk (to name two services) but it would be nice to have everything in one buddy list window.