Color me impressed. AOL is developing a “lite” version of AIM which gets rid of all the fluff. No ads, no annoying themes, Plaxio, VoIP or streaming video. Just your basic, standard messaging. Hell, it even supports tabs.
I really like the direction AOL is attemping to move into as well, or atleast, what they “talk” of moving into.
“this is really the future of AOL: light, fast, free products that compliment our bigger, more feature-rich products.”
If this actually pans out then it’s only taken them something like 10 years to identify a core audience that they were ignoring. Now granted, the “a-listers” or gatekeepers are typically the ones who would avoid AOL products like the plague, for obvious reasons.
I actually just finished installing this on my windows virtual machine and it appears to only be using about 5Mb of RAM at the moment with one of my alternate buddy lists. Not bad at all. Far lighter than the crap that is Triton (AOL’s new AIM). The only thing I dont like about it at the moment is the interface. It doesnt use standard windows widgets like the 5.x branch but more the somewhat obnoxious and hard to use WinAMP type widgets. Ah well, cant have everything.
Here’s a direct link to download it if you want to test it: AIM ET