Thanks to AOL, Instant Messaging is now an ecosystem. This morning they announced OpenAIM, effectively a programatization of the OSCAR protocol, AOL’s long-since-reverse-engineered network interface for Instant Messaging. This effectively legitimizes what has become common practice — hacking IM for fun and profit. Both Adium (for OSX) and Meebo use the open-source libpurple library to access the various Instant Messaging networks. At my insistence, EQO implemented this as well.

That AOL is now embracing, rather than oscillating between pretending they don’t see and vaguely threatening to block and/or sue third party developers leveraging and enhancing their Instant Messaging platform is a huge leap forward — both for the third-party developer community and for AOL and AIM themselves. This should not be considered to be a strategic advantage for AOL: I would hope that this should cause YahOo and MSN to follow suit.

Likely spurned by the API programs of the likes of MySpace and Facebook, someone woke up at AOL one day and realized that Instant Messaging is indeed the web’s oldest and most mature social network. I can only surmise that Userplane’s Michael Jones was influential in this move and if so, he is to be congratulated. The mechanism that will make the Social Networking aspects of IM operable, and will ultimately stimulate a re-emergence of the relevance of vanilla instant messaging networks, is the API. From across the pond, Facebook might look back some day and realize that their greatest failing was in not deploying an Instant Messenger implementation using XMPP.

For the geeks among you, Libpurple was spawned from the clarification emerging from the logical separation of GAIM as a library used by these third parties (now libpurple) from GAIM as an application (now pidgin). While the two are still intertwined, separating them as projects allows folks to focus their gaze on either client-side utility or service side utility.. and this is key.

Google’s lingua franca for Instant Messaging is XMPP, which emerged from within Jabber. Central to their philosophy around XMPP is the noble notion of openness and Federation — allowing users on the various networks to interact with one another via those networks. It’s a noble cause, but one which has largely been supplanted by multi-protocol IM clients like Adium and Trillian.

The notion of Federation (propagated originally at Pulver’s Instant Messaging ‘99 conference by a younger version of yours truly nearly 10 years ago) between the major players of IM (at that time, AOL, MSN, YahoO, and ICQ) is IMHO a worthy but fairly naive goal, which Google frustratingly still weakly attempts to further. What Google Talk has cobbled together in their Instant Messaging garden is a long list of Instant Messaging also-rans.

So… Federation aside (most of us are over it, except for Johnny-come-latelies like Google) what we’re all looking for is to be able to leverage the community and signalling backplanes offered by Instant Messaging. Into those, third-parties can build smart applications, such as a recommendation service, on top of the Instant Messaging networks and use them to their own ends while further propagating the network itself. Used responsibly, a network API can allow for rapid growth of these applications while increasing user convenience and enhancing their realtime communications experience.

I personally flew to each of the major IM networks in 2006 begging for exactly this. The only thing that would make me happier is a proper tokenized authentication mechanism, such as is used by Flickr or can be found in OAuth. This would allow applications to add functionality without forcing users to compromise their UserIDs and Passwords, which is a major security flaw and creates a trust hurdle for users.

By opening up and supporting their API, though, AOL can now openly police their ecosystem and reach out to previously-untouchable folks like the Adium crew and encourage them in different directions (such as adding voice support). I’d like to see AOL allow third parties to instantiate SIP calling sessions on-net to on-net, for example.

This is a big step forward. Social networking sites, you are now on notice.