AOL's instant-messaging service has become an institution for millions of users worldwide, but can it make a difference to the Internet firm's bottom line?
That's very much on the mind of the folks who manage Time Warner subsidiary America Online. They want that loyalty to pay off as the Internet service provider seeks to offset declining subscriber rates for its core dial-up service and gain ground on Yahoo, Microsoft and Google.
So on Thursday, AOL activated a free Web-based email account for every customer with an AIM screen name.
The company has also begun to reshape the underlying architecture of AIM, to make it a free communication portal with tools for SMS, VoIP, video chat, instant messaging (IM), file sharing, blogging and now email. That's due this summer.
The stakes are high for AOL. It has lost a growing number of dial-up and broadband subscribers, and it is fiercely trying to be a part of an online advertising resurgence that has lifted Google and Yahoo to astonishing heights.
ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com talked to Chamath Palihapitiya, vice-president and general manager of AIM and ICQ, on the eve of the AIM Mail launch.
Q: How does broadband — especially as you just were a vice-president at AOL for broadband — play into the new instant-messaging services?
A: What we've seen is that IM is very much a broadband behaviour. And what people really want is a unified communication experience. They're looking for a service that can do email, IM, SMS, video, voice, and there is no one place for it. What AIM is trying to do is live up to that promise.
When we launch the new AIM, we will be the only service that integrates all of those together. We have a huge user base, and our basic message to them is really simple: If you have a screen name, your AIM mailbox is ready for you. All you have to do is activate it.
How can you possibly catch up to established free email services from Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail?
There are two things we're counting on. One is convenience, the other is the feature set. When we did research, people said that they take their screen name and use it when they sign up for free email. We think that by giving people no reason to go and launch a separate service offers a lot of conveniences.
The feature set we're providing is industry leading. We have the best spam and antivirus service for email, because it's the same that we provide to AOL users. (Last year, we cut spam to our users by 75 percent.) The second point is storage. Two gigabytes of storage — that's enough for all users' email needs.
