Last week I loaded up my AIM and got the following mesage

AIM added a new AIM Bots Group to your Buddy List
Send IM to moviefone and shoppingbuddy for great holiday flicks and gift ideas

I looked around the blogosphere to find out if I was the only one and found this post on PaidContent which referenced a WSJ article. After confirming it was from AOL and not some random IM spam I was pretty confused . . . I IM’ed with the bots for a while, and came to two conclusions . . .

1. hey thats pretty cool. . .
2. damn AOL is fucking around with my buddy list . . . if there ever was a egregious violation of privacy/trust this is it

Ideas like these bots have been around since bubble 1.0 but the “warn” feature in AIM prevented scalable implementation of these applications since anyone (including competitors) could shut down a bot app. AOL, being the draconian walled garden enterprise that it was, refused to open up their API to allow “certified” bots to be built that could not be “warned.” As a result, a slew of entrepreneurs threw away their business plans and went after some sort of 2.0 opportunities instead.

Instead of railing on AOL for being a “sbot” master, I’m going to take another (perhaps more harsh) approach. That is . . . I can’t believe AOL hasn’t learned its lesson from the last 5 years. After squandering the chance to kick MSN’s ass and failing to realize that it already is what Yahoo! hopes to but may never become . . . (nothing on Google . . . we all fucked up on that one) . . . its following a web 1.0, proprietary approach to interactive IM again. . . ie . . AOL is thinking way too small and way too closed . . . Is virginia really this far from the valley that these guys just dont get it?

This is what I think AOL should do with this market opportunity

1. Open up the AIM API
2. Build hosting infrastructure (open not proprietary) for IM bots (with slews of technical backends - jboss, php, ruby on rails etc)
3. Build a certification, re-certification, and dispute resolution system (think Verisign + Truste + whitelist infrastructure) for bots
4. Create a simple to use “if-then-like” XML based language for creating simple bots (but still support standard rest and/or soap interconnects for more advanced apps) and simple web based development enviroment (like wordpress is for content)
5. Charge for hosting (which is optional) and the certification system
6. Build a marketplace for discovering and rating these bots
7. Build a payment mechanism for bot builders to charge for these bots (and take a slice from each transaction)
8. Build a text based advertising network (more on this later)
9. Lastly, integrate voice XML standard into the API

Now, if you ask me if this is really that big of a market for this kind of investment I’ll say two words . . . mobile applications. The premium SMS market is way too screwed up (I talked about this in this post. . BTW before eBay bought Skype). Essentially greedy mobile carriers are killing the potential of the market by insisting on taking 30%-70% of GROSS REVENUE of premium text messages. With AIM having decent penetration into mobile devices, this is an end around for entreperneurs to build ANY type of mobile text applications which they could not before due to economics of the value chain (such as selling movie tickets through the cellphone). The idea here, which I hope AOL gets, is that anyone could get up and running, with less than $1,000 in startup cost, his or her version of 4info. The opportunity for running a location based SMS advertising network embedded into the hosting infrastructure as a monetization tool for app developers is HUGE as well (ie adsense for mobile apps). Furthermore, the voip/mobile voip opportunity is just as huge if not bigger . . . BUT I’m not going to talk about it since everyone knows about Skype and Nuance. . . (plus other personal reaons).

Come on AOL, you missed out on web 2.0, this is your chance to be the ultimate enabler and aggregator of Mobile 2.0 . . . dont fuck it up by spamming my AIM instead. . .