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Will AIM Compete With Facebook?

Posted by Nick O'Neill on October 4th, 2007 4:00 PM

Yesterday, the Washington Post published an interesting article. It discussed many of the features in the new version of AIM that was released yesterday. It has a number of social networking features including user profiles, status updates and photo tagging. Additionally, there is an AIM developer API that was previously released. So with all of these great features, does it work as a substitute for Facebook?

Not yet! While I think there is the potential for a social networking desktop based application, I don’t think AIM is going to be the one to launch that product. Their main problem is the brand associations that users already have. Feel free to call me out if you think I’m wrong on this one. The Flock has already accomplished much of this but they have yet to experience mass adoption. It will be interesting to see how this pans out. Do you think AIM or any of these desktop applications can compete with existing social networks/platforms?

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 4th, 2007 at 4:00 pm and is filed under Analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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    It definitely raises some interesting questions, but i think you hit it on the head. AIM's brand association is a hard nut to crack. AOL has always been known for its instant messaging and no matter what AOL releases/has released it will never hit the same adoption that aim has had. AOL has had gaming and profiles for many years and i don't see anyone adopting them. I would imagine, that probably close 95% of the features in AIM aren't used by the majority, if at all.

    Regarding desktop applications in the social networking space. i can't see this picking up. More and more we are living are online lives in a web browser with the ability to access all of our content whether it be e-mail, bookmarks, contacts, etc from any computer, anywhere, at any time. Because of this i find it hard imagine being tied to a desktop application for social networking.

    The era of the desktop application is near its end.
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    Wouldn't AOL be better served in leveraging their brand strength by developing a Facebook app to embed AIM chats in Facebook?

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