AIM Robots are sponsored and operated by AOL and other vendors and appear as buddy icons in the buddy lists of AIM users who install them.

For example, users can send an instant message to the AOLYellowpages AIM Robot with the name of a local business or with simply a keyword and the robot replies with related directory listings. The Wall Street Journal robot lets users set up news alerts to be delivered via AIM, as well as request stock prices.

For those who have been under an IT rock, Time Warner is looking to sell off AOL. With Yahoo dropping out the main parties interested are Microsoft and Google.

AOL's instant messaging technologies and userbase is its crown jewel. While Google does have an IM service I couldn't figure out why Google would be interested. How wrong I was! Google doesn't care about AOL's dial-up customers or adding AIM users. Google sees AIM as a conduit to spread services.

Decius has a T-Mobile Sidekick. So does my friend Strick. Web browsing on it is about on par with a 9600 baud modem. While there are some services/proxies/gateways which will strip HTML down to something doable on a handheld, I find they leave much to be desired. This is because they are doing it in real time. At times its faster to IM Rattle to search for something than to actually search for something.

So what does this mean about IM? IM is fast. IM is faster than web browsing on most non-PC devices. AIM compatible IM clients exist in many mobile phones. AIM has a ton of existing users. Creating Google IM Robots to respond to Local searches, Direction requests, Maps, address lookups would fill a need for mobile devices. In short, AOL and AIM allows Google to expand beyond the computer.

Why would Google want AOL?