I recently came across this site, FreeRice.com, which I thought it is very nice and creative. It is nice because you can learn vocabulary and help end the world hunger. The idea is very creative. This is how it works: you go to FreeRice.com and play their vocabulary game, for each question answered correctly 10 grains of rice will be donated by the sponsors to help people living in poverty. It is a win-win situation - you get to play the game, FreeRice get the traffics, advertisers get their exposure, and people get the free rice. If you like the idea, please help to spread out the word. For more details, please read their FAQ page.

Well, the new AIM 6 has been out for quite some time and it is time to give my thoughts on it. Compared to the previous version of AIM, version 5, AIM 6 sports a much new and improved look. In addition, it comes with a handy tool that lets you search as you type for your buddy. This is especially useful for those who have a massive list of buddies. The new AIM also allows you to change the color scheme of your buddy list window. In addition, an assortment of plug-ins have been released for Facebook, music, location, etc. One of the most dominant feature which I enjoy is tabbed conversations. This allows you to have multiple conversations with people by simply switching tabs. This saves a lot of room on the taskbar. But for those of you who like the separate window for each conversation, have no fear, you can always ungroup and regroup your chat windows.

The above is just a few of the many changes major changes that AIM has taken to keep their instant messaging client competitive. But I have found a few things that annoy me a little. First, is the installation of all these “mini” (a.k.a. useless) applications such as Wild Tangent, Plaxo, AOL browser, and so forth. Another thing that is annoying is how AIM has to have two processes running rather than just the aim6.exe process. The other process is the aolsoftware.exe process which is sadly needed to run AIM 6. Overall, AIM 6 uses about 30,000K of memory usage with those two processes combined which some might say bloated, but something has to be exchanged for the new look.

I have been also suggestions other things to the AIM team on their blogs which I hope some of my suggestions get implemented, but we will see if AIM will gain any more points for users. One of my suggestions was to implement the “Now Playing” song in an away message that updates whenever a new song is played by simply inserting a “%song” tag. In my eyes, Trillian might pull something off with their private beta version IM client.
One of my newer suggestions was a better AIM Today page that does not take the whole window, but a small window as found in the older version of AIM.

See below of my concepts:

AIM Today Concept

AIM + AIM Today Concept