In a blog post entitled AIM Pages Launches - First Impression  Mike Arrington of TechCrunch writes

AIM Pages, the new AOL Myspace competitor that we’ve been buzzing about for the last couple of weeks, launched this morning at aimpages.com.

First impression: The site is clean and organized (something I’m not sure the Myspace crowd wants), and module based (about me, photos, etc.). Modules can be dragged to any point on the screen. It’s not working properly with Firefox (or possibly at all), which I imagine will be fixed. UPDATE: I am using Firefox 2.0 on a Mac, not 1.5. This may be the cause of my problems.

If AIM Pages launched today as a stand alone company with no affiliateion to AOL, I’d be ripping it apart. Personal publishing is very easy, and users have too many choices. Anything new really has to stand out, and AIM Pages doesn’t. AIM Pages is a slick looking Ajax product, but is not really raising the bar v. Myspace, Tagworld and others. I’m also dissapointed that it’s not working properly in Firefox. Now, the fact that your AIM Page will be prepopulated with your AIM buddies is a big competitive advantage, and I imagine AIM will have some level of success due to that asset.

In the reverse direction, according to the post MySpace IM is Live by Om Malik, MySpace is adding an integrated IM client to their social networking service. This same tack has also been taken by Yahoo with Yahoo! 360 and by Microsoft with MSN Spaces. The integration is beta in all of the aforementioned services but it seems clear that within a year that most of the major Web players will have a suite of social software services that will include IM, social networking, blogging, photo and media sharing as all part of a single integrated experience. So far, Google are the laggards in this space but I wonder how long it will take them to play catch up.

In the meantime, you can compare and contrast what a personal page looks like in all of the aforementioned services

1. http://spaces.msn.com/darestestspace/
2. http://www.aimpages.com/tenor/profile.html
3. http://360.yahoo.com/profile-oifn9.o6da.Tz.JDUSJEGMMj6ZQxnfhU279kmtOyttkPMw--
4. http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=76636812

Since I work on the Social Networking platform for Windows Live, I'm interested in people's observations about this convergence in social software applications. Holla at me.