It’s Official: This Is the New AIM

On Monday we reported on AIM’s kind-of-sort-of-secret new video chat site. As of today, it’s official, and it’s just the beginning of a new direction for the hoary chat service. We all use AIM. And yet we can also all agree it’s a horrid, outdated user experience. Even Aol knows that, so it bought Thing Labs to make it not suck. So far so good. “We landed at AIM and started looking at what we could do that’s new and cool,” says Jason Shellen, who previously ran both Google Reader and Blogger before starting Thing Labs. “We wanted to give AIM a real Web presence.” To that end the new AV by AIM runs right in the browser. Even better: it doesn’t require any kind of dedicated account. There’s no sign in, no need to know a screen name, or have everyone on the same service. All you need is an internet connection and a camera. The short URLs are designed to be shared on Twitter and Facebook. And while there’s no random chat feature or directory listing, we’re still pretty sure that people are going to use this to get naked. So what happens to the old AIM? Shellen and team are in the process of remaking it for the Web and making it play nice with others “This is our first Web product, but AIM.com should be a place where we offer a decent set of tools,” says Shellen. “We’ve made the decision we do want to open up and federate. Click below for more