Guy with sword gets shot

There's a scene in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" where this tough guy with a sword puts on a big scary show with the sword, twirling it around to show what a master he is, and Indiana Jones just pulls out his gun and shoots the guy. What makes the scene work is the contrast between a master with a old weapon and an average schmoe with a new weapon. AOL's recent moves against .NET are like the guy with the sword.

The company announced an identity initiative codenamed "Magic Carpet" and promoted as "Screen Name Service" that would compete with Microsoft Passport. It would allow web users to sign on to multiple websites in one step, and to use their AOL username and password for access to third party sites like eBay.

AOL has also announced that technology to allow other IM providers to interoperate with AIM will begin testing soon. In a July 23 progress report to the FCC on making AIM interoperable with outside vendors, the company stated that third party IM vendors would be able, on a technical level, to interoperate with AIM.

However, neither of these is much of an alternative to .NET. Passport's roots are in single sign-in for web sites, but its importance now is as an identity technology for all Internet software; Magic Carpet/Screen Name Service is strictly about web sites. Similarly, Messenger's literal focus is on chat, but its importance is as an interchange for messages of all kinds. The open AIM initiative allows third party chat messages, and only chat messages, to leverage AIM's presence stream.

These two attempts to protect its turf are about identity and presence, but only address market needs from a year or more ago. Single sign-on for web sites is an old battle, as is IM interoperability that doesn't allow for events to be hooked on the client side. Generic identity and presence are the current battle; AOL's leading edge initiatives fail to address either.

On the identity front, AOL needs to make it possible for all kinds of software to use AIM screenames for authentication, not just IM. Groupware apps, for example, should be able to ride on buddy lists and IM identities.

On the presence front, the action is client side. It should be possible for external software to send an event on the AIM stream, have AIM map the message to a local handler, and have the handler receive the event. For example, a market data service should be able to send an alert about a drastic price drop to an AIM user, then have AIM activate custom software that opens a dialog box with a blinking red light.

That's how the sword/gun thing comes up. AOL is fighting with out of date weapons. Even if they do a great job, it doesn't matter.