AIM is not much to look at.  It is a monotasker (to borrow the word from Alton Brown) and not a pretty one.  It is available for Mac, but is largely unused because iChat, which has the advantage of being both pre-installed and located on the default Dock, uses the AIM chat protocol.  On the PC front, AIM has steadily lost ground over the years as all-in-one IM clients took over.  Chat wars haven’t been a big thing for years, when Yahoo! and Google (which launched Google Talk soon after GMail) and Microsoft and Aol (then AOL) each jealously guarded their chat protocols to prevent interoperability.  The upshot was inconvenience for the user.

MSN Messenger still exists but only as a casualty of the Chat Wars (much like MSN).  Yahoo! Chat still boasts a hearty user base.  And Google and Aol have had an uneasy detente for the past several years, with interoperability in the chat window in GMail as well as in Apple’s iChat.  But now with Google moving once again into the Social Networking field, old truces may fall and new alliances like Aol and Facebook form.

Let us not forget that Google is also in some very nasty fights against Apple and Microsoft.  Google’s Nexus One looks to unhorse the iPhone (that has yet to be seen).  It is working on an OS called ChromeOS which would naturally go against OSX and Windows.  And speaking of Windows, Google also has its own browser to fight Internet Explorer (Microsoft) and Safari (Apple) available for Windows and in beta form on Mac, where Safari holds a lot of traction.  On the Search front, Google is fighting against Microsoft’s Bing!, which, it should be noted, could in theory be supplemented if and when Microsoft manages to buy out Yahoo!

So there sits Google, fighting battles on too many fronts to name and starting more fights of its own.  As I’ve previously stated, I’m not a fan of AIM by any stretch and giving it Facebook functionality won’t make me want to install it on my Mac.  However, this is a prime opportunity for Apple to ride in on a white horse and do a deal with Aol and/or Facebook to add Facebook to iChat.  I’ve been a Mac user (I use all platforms) for over four years.  Since then, I’ve felt that the iChat UI is simply the best-looking interface for chat.  I’ve used Pidgin, Adium and even Trillian years ago.  But, pixel for pixel, iChat works nicest.  On the iPhone, BeeJive, in my opinion a must-have app, works so nicely in no small part because it uses the iChat UI.

The Aol/Facebook alliance provides a unique opportunity for several companies, each fighting their own battle with Google, to strike a blow.  Aol can update not just its client but its protocol to allow for multiple instances to run (opening GMail won’t knock out your iChat connection).  Facebook can give its users another reason to keep a Facebook tab open by having AIM right there.  Apple can get some more pixels from the press by updating a program that is starting to gather dust.

These are all some minor things that Google’s adversaries can do to maybe get Google to rethink its expansionist ideas.

Generally speaking, I have a variety of chat programs open at any given time on a variety of platforms. At home in the evening, I usually have my media server (which doubles as an internet terminal) on, as well as my MacBook Pro. The chances are that there is a GMail window open on either the server or the Mac. Additionally, I have iChat almost always running on the Mac. On top of that, on my iPhone, I’m usually running BeeJive. As a result, I usually get a few error messages associated, not with not knowing how to run a computer, but with running too many instances. The biggest offender is AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), which, as anyone with multiple GMail instances open knows, bugs the user with alerts that there are multiple AIM instances running.

AIM is a classic piece of Nineties tech. It launched in 1997 and quickly became the dominant chat program, displacing ICQ (pronounced “I Seek You”). AIM would link to your AOL Buddy List, meaning that if all you wanted to do was IM people, you didn’t have to run AOL. Several features were added over the years (file sending, photo sending) but, honestly, except for less than a half-dozen new features and a long-delayed UI updating, AIM now looks like AIM then. iChat within a year of its 2003 launch, was touting AIM compatibility. At the end of 2007, ten years after AIM’s launch, Google was touting AIM compatibility in Google Talk. And open-source programs like Adium and Gaim also have AIM compatibility. The question is why?

AIM is stale. Compatibility is sketchy at best with the frequent inability to file send between AIM clients (file-sending between iChat and AIM is a crap-shoot). But most irksome is the chronic notifications of multiple instances. In 1997, a household probably had one computer and that computer was connected to the internet via either 2-wire or 4-wire telephone cable on a 56k baud connection. Now, more than a decade later, a household may have upwards of a half-dozen connections to the web when you factor in mobile phones. Discouraging multiple instances is a dead concept on a dead platform made by a dead company. And yet AIM is a zombie of the internet. It should be dead and it won’t die.

Texting is a product of the Nineties, as in it began in 1990 and slowly grew throughout the decade. Twenty years after its birth, it is the most widely used mobile data service worldwide. And yet it is still constrained to 160 characters. Now, we have mobile chat clients on our smartphones. The iPhone has BeeJive (if you haven’t installed BeeJive, do it; it’s worth the $10). Android, not requiring app-store approval, also has a variety of chat programs; so does BlackBerry. Texting, it seems, is no longer all that relevant. In a smartphone world, it’s dead tech. We’re still using only 160 characters and, most of all, we’re being charged through the nose for the privilege of it.

And in a cruel instance of gouging the customer, AT&T is now requiring people with certain phones to also have a text plan too. This is simply absurd. It’s bad enough that customers get gouged when it comes to texting (the actual cost is negligible). But to force dead tech on customers, that’s egregious.

It’s time for these zombies to be put down. To AOL – either actually overhaul the AIM protocol or sell it to someone who will. I’m sure that Google would be happy to take it and your Buddy Lists off your cold, dead hands. And to AT&T (and it’s evil step-sister Verizon), start giving away texting for free to people with smartphones with unlimited data plans. I know there are unlimited texting plans that you can buy but a smartphone shouldn’t need an SMS plan.