AIM, which is short for AOL Instant Messenger, is one of the popular Instant Messengers with more than 53 million active users. Only Jabber comes close to this numbers while other popular clients such as MSN have only half of that active user base. One big problem with AIM is the integration of advertisements and bundled software which is not needed to run AIM at all.

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Aol will offer movie and tv show downloads from Paramount Pictures in their new video portal. Downloads will be sold for prices ranging from $9.99 to $19.99 which suggests that most users will be quite unhappy with the pricing. Amazon Unbox and Apple’s iTunes is offering download in the same price category and every other portal will most likely follow them.

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Aol released private search queries of 500.000 AOL users to the public. Analysts and Journalists alike are having a busy time analysing the data for various reasons. I was able to identify three different motivations: 1. How big is the privacy breach, 2. Is it possible to identify someone from the queries and 3. analysing the queries from a marketing point of view.

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AOL surely did not think about the immense backlash they would receive from the internet community when they released anonymised logs of 500,000 AOL users at the AOL research website. The file consisted of about 20.000.000 million web queries from about 500.000 AOL users in the course of three months (march to may 2006). The AOL username was replaced by a unique ID, everything else was kept unchanged in the logs.

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