Check out this little screen shot snippet that I just captured. I grabbed this from the header of an email message in Outlook 2003. Now, how do you suppose that the AOL presence icon got there?
I think I have a clue… At first I thought it might be something to do with the Live Messenger beta I just installed. After all, in May 2003 the two companies agreed to hold talks on integration. Alas, it appears to be a feature of Plaxo instead. Good on the folks at Plaxo! It’s very useful, even if it’s disappointing that Microsoft and AOL are apparently no closer to a solution.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry maker Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
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Cool…kind of like what Mac OS X has had for…hmm…several years?
Of course, the interesting thing is….I never use that feature. I live in IM first, and "fall back" to email. I suppose it might be useful if the email app somehow had access to Chat archives as well, but as is, it's a "neat" feature that doesn't add any value.
I think it adds value Boris. I'm pretty email centric. What this lets me know, as I am reading the email, is if the sender is available to talk right now.
Windows has been able to do this for several years as well, but only with MSN. What's interesting is that this spans multiple IM systems.
Just a further follow up to this. My friend Jim Courtney did some more digging and discovered that there is very deep integration between AIM and Plaxo. You can log into Plaxo with your AIM ID, now, for instance.
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