Feature Creep

“Those of you who read this site via RSS/Atom/LiveJournal syndication may have missed our latest site feature, ‘IM to a friend’.

As of this last Friday, there's a tiny AIM icon next to the title of each entry. When it's clicked on, most AIM clients should give you a new message window containing the URL of the entry you'd like to share with a friend. After you enter their screen name and send the message, feel free to chat about what you've sent their way. It works transparently and is loads easier than a standard copy and paste.

Yeah, we're trying to harbor conversation about our site and drive our traffic up. We're also trying to make sending URLs to friends a bit easier. We stole the idea from our friends at blogging.la….

Note: Trillian doesn't seem to install handlers for ‘aim:‘ links. If you run Trillian and click on the link, there's a good chance that nothing will happen. iChat and the official AIM client seem to be all good tho. Sorry Trillian users.” [Preshrunk]

Interesting idea for those libraries exploring IM. Might be a nice reverse idea on the idea of creating IM interfaces into the catalog, too., and it shows how easily you could integrate IM reference into your web site.