AOL’s wildly popular IM program, AIM, has released version 6.0 of its software tonight. When you’re a global giant, you don’t have to lead the state of the art (unless you’re Google) – you can just follow the lead of the best startups that haven’t near the market share you have. That’s especially true of AIM, who has perhaps the ultimate bragging rights regardless: 44.8 million monthly unique visitors, 5 million more than Yahoo! and MSN combined, the company says. Market dominance plus following the lead of innovative smaller players is not a bad strategy, as long as you’re relatively quick about it. Update: I got properly checked in comments on this late night post, the world outside the US uses a variety of other IM programs as well. Thanks for reading, everyone else, we do want to do a good job covering markets throughout the world. AIM 6.0 is built on top of the experimental project AIM Triton. That means that a lot of “value added” features like links to AOL music will be present – perhaps people like that but judging from the screenshot after the fold I can’t imagine using it. Desktop IM should be open source or a loss leader with unobtrusive ads at most. If you are an AIM user who doesn’t like the upgrade and insists on still using AIM anyway see oldversion.com. AIM is Windows only but does have a new API, which could lead to interesting developments. The absence of interoperability across platforms means that Adium or Trillian are the only real options for heavy IM users, but casual users will have their experience changed by tonight’s upgrade. If you don’t mind a Windows only IM that can’t communicate with other IM platforms, has plenty of advertisements and a number of honestly useful features like mobile integration – then the new AIM could be for you. Highlights of the new version include the following: → Read More