Has anyone been able to use AIM Pages? It doesn’t work on Safari and it keeps crashing Firefox with all sorts of bizerko errors. I can’t figure out how to add a photo on it and i keep crashing it. I’d love to hear someone else’s feedback who has been able to make it work. Is it fun to play with? What all can you put up there? Does it look cool? (And what’s up with the 16+ thing? That should be very interesting… i wonder how many teens will lie…)
Is 95% functional for me (Firefox)
It’s total AJAX craziness – drag n drop, tiny little popup windows … overall, the user experience is just WEIRD – you’ll be clicking around and suddenly find yourself at a completely different site with no warning
(eg, click “mail” and you’re at AIM Mail, completely different interface)
(edit your profile? you’ve moved from “aimpages.com” to “aimcreate.com”)
biggest thing though … there are options to disallow people from IMing you … but since your profile name is your IM name, that seems pointless. so basically, creating an AIM Pages profile makes your IM name public knowledge (although you may choose not to display enough info to link AIM you to RL you.) this seems weird and pointless to me.
I’ve got it working, using Firefox on Windows XP, although it is very buggy.
http://www.aimpages.com/jhester00/profile.html
I did like the message they gave in the TOS — something about “think about the fact that your mom, or employer can see what you post…” Duh.
Its really buggy… and typically closed as per AOL norms. I can’t put my flickr pics up… need to upload them to AOL photos. If I click that I want to allow people to e-mail me, it provides a link to AOL mail. There was code puke in a few places. It auto creates your buddies, but it only shows your buddies who also made AIMpages pages. It wouldn’t allow me to display just my AIM buddies.
I don’t think MySpace has anything to worry about.
I got in the first day it opened earlier this week and had a nightmare of a time. I tried it on Firefox, IE, Safari and Camino. I walked through it with one of my web developers and when he signed up I realized that there was a problem I had in sign up that had wrecked my template. I deleted it and started over and now it is working in the normal buggy way as opposed to the not at all buggy way.
Just wanted to point out that there *is* a flickr module. In the ‘Under construction’ category, named ‘Unofficial Flickr’.
It tends to work on Firefox 1.5.0.3 on the Mac. It works in IE on windows, but is slower.
It is buggy no matter what browser or OS you are in. There are a lot of server app errors that shine through at the moment.
The +16 is similar to the chat rooms in AOL, from what I gather. Finding people I know that are on the system who I do not know their AIM screen names is really hard.
I had seen some versions of this months back and some things improved and others… well, will be improving.
blargh… yeah it pretty much sucks no matter how many OS’s or browsers you use. On the plus side, I had several year’s worth of spam on my old AOL email and a 6-year old AOL hometown page I had forgotten about. woohoo. AOL really knows how to make a terrible web experience. They’ve had 6 years to get my attention. Also, not a single person on my buddy list has bothered to check AIM pages out yet.
I think there is more opportunity for myspace to encroach on aol than vice versa. If only MySpace would integrate AIM protocol into their IM client, they could basically induct the AIM userbase into the MySpace social index.
On the other hand, the AIM API might be a perfect way do the same thing but from the other end of the equation. Their technology has the ability to be more pervassive and in more places on the web than jsut one bad social network (myspace is a hosue of cards rupert).
The big problem for AOL is that they do not allow developers to use the presence API along side MSN, Y or any of the other IM competitors. This will hurt AOL more and more in the long run.
None of the big boys (except maybe google) is willing to experiment with the idea of a meta-identity. Ideally, a third party could create a hybrid social network / IM network that funcions on the concept of a trillian-style meta-contact.
MySpace is going to have a hard time just getting enough of their existing users to download the new client and flip enough ads to pay for its ongoing development, let alone getting native AIM users to switch to another client.
The fact that both MySpace IM and AIM pages do not automatically import the buddy list is shocking. MySpace has a legacy IM system to phase out, but AIM just blew it.
P.S. long time no see danah! Wanna shed some light on Yahoo IM direction?
p.p.s
a little pre-beta preview of an IM page that I worked on…
http://x.meca.com/presence/myspace_landingpage.aspx?recipient=jozecuervo
AIM Pages – don’t bother. Not only did I experience a ton of bugs (even for a “beta,” including the inability to edit my page without deleting it every time I wanted to change something), but within hours of singing up, I started getting porn spam from IM bots.
It’s pretty much a waste of time – it’s not as popular as MySpace (and definitely no better looking, which is sad), and not as flexible as Tagworld. Don’t bother.
AIM pages suck. I tryimg to get back my original member directory profile. At this point I may even pay for the help cuz aol tech is useless.
AIM Pages is still beta. Expect bugs in beta product, that’s what betas are all about. Try it again now. It’s much better these days, but still lots more to do.
um it says i am not old enough to use it. how do i change my age so i can use it?
I have not been able to use it all. I have a mac and I use Safari, so it will not work for me. I tried to use Internet Explorer but it just flipped out and made my computer go wacko, so I don’t know. All of my friends use it, though and I wish it would work for me, because people are always asking why I don’t have one, and then they pester me to know end.
By the way… why do I have to type the word “apophenia” and why is it required???