Hello ICQ/AIM!

Thursday, 17 January 2008

Welcome aboard!

xmpp.oscar.aol.com:5222 seems to work. Login with your AIM/ICQ credentials.

Via Mickael and jdev.

Update: the service has been on and off as expected from an unofficial test service. The AOL engineers did a pretty good job for a alpha version.

So far this works:

connect with both AIM and ICQ accounts, using [email protected] or [email protected];
talk to any AIM, ICQ and .Mac accounts;
typing notifications work fine;
you can join ICQ chat-rooms.

Things that I could not make it work:

file transfers;
avatars.

All in all, its a great first version, and I can only hope that AOL starts talking about this publicly, because I think all the XMPP community is eager to help out.

Right now, we only have client-to-server via XMPP, so any XMPP client can connect to the ICQ/AIM servers but requires a ICQ/AIM account. Of course, the final destination is server-to-server connectivity, so that I can chat with AIM/ICQ buddies without a ICQ/AIM account.

When GTalk appeared, it took them about 6 months to open up server-to-server, so its normal to show up with client-to-server and move up to server-to-server.

So lets give them some time.

Congrats to all at AOL. Welcome!