To say that AOL's new AIM program is an instant messenger is to diminish it unacceptably. AIM Triton, as the program is now called, is an online communicator that bundles IM, email, voice chat, video chat, browsing, bookmarking, and RSS aggregation into a two-window interface. This whopping upgrade to previous AIM configurations adds welcome features, but also—disappointingly for a program now out of beta—still houses a couple of bugs…
AIM Triton is presented in two windows: the AIM messenger, and AOL Explorer. In the former, chatting transpires. In the latter, tabbed Web browsing is blended with an email interface, bookmarks and history, and RSS feeds. The chatting itself is a tabbed experience—AOL has gotten religion about tabs. Each conversation can tab among IM, email, voice (you need a TotalTalk account), and video (”coming soon”) interfaces. And multiple conversations with multiple Buddies all reside in that single window. This setup, in which many rich-media conversations can take place at once, is perhaps Triton’s greatest innovation. Those users who wish to hold fast to the multiple-window system can tear off any tabbed conversation into its own window. This manipulability is useful for consolidating slow chats in one window, while keeping active chats surfaced in their own windows.
Unfortunately, the Friendly Names feature, which is supposed to force AIM to display real Buddy names instead of screen names, simply does not work in my version. I cannot get a real name to show. This bug must be fixed pronto; it is a deal-breaker. I communicate with a virtual office full of people who have the weirdest screen names you’ve ever seen, and I have no desire to learn them. This is a universal issue. Friendly Names must work or people won’t use this thing.
Triton stumbles badly in the voice chat department. With Google and Yahoo! offering free voice chatting, AOL connects users to each other’s voices via TotalTalk, a pricey VoIP solution. More expensive than Vonage, TotalTalk is an inappropriate solution in the computer-to-computer voice chat space. I also received Net2Phone popups, confusing the picture with yet another irrelevant service.
AIM Radio is also a wasted service, as the sound quality is unacceptably low. Here again, in an ocean of exciting free services, AOL is offering an inappropriate solution.
Mail is not yet integrated into the AIM chat window, but does function beautifully in the AOL Explorer window. I find the use of a popup window to display message unwelcome, but otherwise the experience is a good one. Attachments up to 16MB are permitted, and each free account gets 2GB of storage. Clearly competing with Gmail, AOL takes a swipe at Google’s business model with this statement: ”We don’t target ads at you based on what you write in your email. That would be creepy.” Well, it’s not creepy in the slightest, but I appreciate the snark.
Quitting AIM Triton is more difficult than ever; the damn thing hangs on for dear life, forcing you to reach into the service tray of the Windows taskbar twice to make it really go away, and that’s after closing both windows. UPDATE ON THIS POINT: It gets worse. Once you kill the program from the system tray, that system tray icon will never appear again. In the future, when you close the AIM window, it disappears but the program continues running. There is no visible means of quitting then. You must reinvoke the program from the Start menu or desktop icon, then sign out in the File menu, then kill the window again. This subterfuge is fairly evil, despite what AOL might say about seamlessly keeping its users connected.
THE UPSHOT:
AIM Triton is the first stand-alone iteration of AOL’s chat to which I have been attracted. I appreciate the presence
of AOL Explorer, which solves the nasty habit of AIM’s predecessor of taking over the browser to display the AIM Today
page, which was toxic. Many early reviews complain of the browser’s presence, and normally I would agree. In this case,
the value of feature integration built into the thing is attractive enough to warrant its presence. And it seems like a
damn good browser after a couple of hours of use. Be sure to check out the Tab Explorer feature—that is some cool
tab-floating eye candy.
The small AIM bugs are tormenting, for sure, and it’s a shame about voice chat. But for text-chatting, file-sharing, browsing, RSS reading, and (partly) integrated mail, AIM Triton offers a compelling package.
1. My take: http://www.trikenit.com/?p=113
Posted at 8:11PM on Dec 18th 2005 by Thomas Mango