as days pass by

My contact page now allows you to chat to me in real-time without having to sign up to an IM service or anything. Steve Chipman, AOL hacker, took a break from painting good pictures of everyone who crosses his path to post about AIM’s new Wimzi widget; if you’ve got an AIM account, you can just go to the Wimzi site and get a widget for your website that allows people to talk to you even without their own AIM account. (It does require JavaScript, mind.) Good work. At the moment I’m just using the stock widget, but I’d like to customise it so that it fits better into the look of the site. Nonetheless, this is a pretty cool thing, especially when you think that this doesn’t have to be used for chat; it’s basically a generic way of throwing data around between websites and networks and computers over a checked network without signup required and easily. On the other hand, that network’s controlled by AOL, which might be a problem. On the third hand, AIM pretty much ranks as the best thing that AOL have done, even if the Pidgin project did have to change their name away from Gaim because AOL’s lawyers complained. I imagine it works with iChat names too, since they’re just AIM under the covers; so, let people chat to you! Open up the flow of discourse. Good work, Steve and the gang.