AIM Express has some serious handshaking issues.

[randomness]

At least, it does from the library cluster here.

Not particularly usable.

Comments

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

You have an AIM account? Mine's my first name and last name as one word. Not that you can find me from that computer.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Cool, thanks for letting me know. I'm attempting to set up a buddy list, but it is not going well.

I'll IM you if I ever get this thing to work.

[uberjay.livejournal.com]

My aim login is the same as my LJ username.

AIM express is pretty terrible—I guess you can't get away with installing a real client on the library cluster...

[starheptagon.livejournal.com]

"Not usable" as in "completely dead"? If so, it might be because AOL recently killed the TOC protocol servers in a political move, breaking several clients, including some that they had written themselves.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

No, "not usable" does not mean "completely dead", at least not in this case. If it did, it would be easier, because I would give up. :)

However, it works just poorly enough that I fought with it for a while entering in screennames.

[holmes-iv.livejournal.com]

You may be interested to know (or indeed, you may already know) that with appropriate setup, you can in fact use AIM from many phones via text-message. Not that I've been racking up the TXT charges this month playing around with stuff like this, or anything...

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Yah, I looked at that. My provider isn't on the list of supported providers.

Just as well, really.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Yah, it won't let me install anything.

Which is good, because it means it's less likely someone's installed BackOrifice or something, but unhelpful in the current circumstance.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Update. I seem to have gotten it to work despite my provider not being one of the supported ones.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

So, do you know if there's a way to initiate IM conversations using AIM's SMS gateway? Thus far I can reply to but not initiate IMs.