AOL's AIM Developer Program - Purple Rain for Developers

As you probably know, I'm not in the news business, and you'll rarely see top-of-the-morning breaking stories here. Lots of other bloggers do that really well, and that's not my thing.

Today's announcement by AOL for their AIM PhoneLine Developer Program is a big story, and may well turn out to be a watershed for Voice 2.0 coming of age among mainstream providers. Everyone is a winner here - AOL, the developer partners, and ultimately subscribers. You can get a good look at this if you're attending Fall VON next week, where three vendors will be showcased by AOL - Iotum, MyNuMo, and mVox Technologies. With AOL's TotalTalk being phased out later this year, this really does look like a transition from Voice 1.0 to Voice 2.0 - something that will be very welcome by the IP community.

In addition to the above parties, Jeff Pulver has got to be pretty happy. Not only is AOL doing this showcase at his show, but these are the kinds of vendors that enable Voice 2.0 services, which are awfully close to the Purple Minutes holy grail Jeff has been searching for from service providers.

I'll segue now to Jeff Pulver's blog for my wrapup. I was privy to this news last night, but not able to post about it then. Other commitments (the paying kind!) prevented me from posting until now, and by now, the story has been done to death - and very well. So, if you're hearing about this story for the first time, I'm going to steer you to the multitude of blog posts that cover this story from many angles. My only insight to add is the fact that the blog coverage was so extensive and much of it happened right away - this itself tells you that AOL is on the right track with Phoneline, and that this is the kind of developer program many have been waiting for.

So, I would steer you to Jeff's post first. From there, it won't be hard to pick up the threads that will lead you to many other posts, all of which are worthy of a read, especially if you are wondering what all the fuss is about for Voice 2.0. I may be missing some, but I'd urge you to check out the posts from Alec Saunders, Andy Abramson, Mark Evans, Mathew Ingram, Jim Courtney, Ken Camp, Garrett Smith, Bruce Stewart, and James Enck.


Technorati tags: AIM Phoneline, Jon Arnold, Voice 2.0, Jeff Pulver