I’m a sucker for sleek-looking bleeding-edge betas, so I decided to try out AIM’s Triton Beta.
Turns out that its bundled with AOL Explorer (a carbon-copy of Netscape, I guess), in the ever-shameless AOL tradition of things.
It looks OK, except for the fact that it also has the ActiveX component. Ewww!
Plus the AOL-E is as slow as dirt. However, I’m only using it since it has this nifty-looking Layout that could best MSN’s explorer. One of the few scores that this Beta has so far.
OK, so the Explorer sucks. However, they have improved AIM quite exponentially.
1) Importing address books from Yahoo, Hotmail/MSN, and Outlook, and the combining of both imports into Plaxo’s address book service (hmmm….OK).
2) The adding of all of those from the aforementioned address books who also happen to have AIM screennames to your buddy list (oooh, score!).
3) The largest address book that I’ve ever had in one place.
OK, I’m stoked. Can they make AOL open-ended as well?
that’s cool…have you ever tried trillian though?
http://www.ceruleanstudios.com
Actually, I’ve been trying to find other alternatives to it, like Gaim. I dunno….as much as I’ve heard of it, I still have this feeling that, even though I may want to try it, I shouldn’t.
Eventually, I may come around to it. Gaim looks plenty sucky, anyway.
However, I may have to ween myself off of AIM, since its the dominating IM service. I’ll still retain Google, since it looks more like a compliment to Google’s Desktop Search (which, I’m hoping, will be able to replace most of the functionings of the Windows Explorer GUI which forms the dominating interface of Windows), which I’m becoming increasingly fond of.
So yeah, I may try Trillian, but in the near future once I get sick enough of AIM Triton.