Displaying your AIM Status

Posted by blainegarrett

May 6, 2008

At work today, I had to figure out how to display someone’s AIM status on a web page (ideally with minimal programming involved). After having a hard time finding simple solutions via google, I asked my coworker Rich if knew of any. Indeed he did, and it was a simple programming free solution.

AOL offers a pretty neat interface into their AIM infrastructure. However, for my needs, I just wanted to display an online/offline graphic that they provide. Check out : http://dev.aol.com/aim/presence for more details and other api methods. All you need is a developer key, which you can get for free via the above link. Once you have that, you can doe something like:


<a href="aim:GoIM?screenname=blainegarrett1">
<img src="http://api.oscar.aol.com/presence/icon?k={developer_key}&t={screenname}" border="0" /> </a>

This method worked perfectly, however :
The Pros : no programming needed, they provide the graphic, you can fetch anyone’s status
The Cons: not overly powerful depending on your needs (can’t create cases), appears to only show online/offline (not away), you have to use their graphics.

A special thanks to Rich for pointing this out. I wasted a good 30 minutes googling for this this morning.

programming