Earlier today I sent an SMS post which did not go through because my AIM bot was offline. (Thank you, power outages.) What surprised me was that I actually received an error message from AIM short code 246246:
AIM
psiccbot is not avail.
1 login <sn> <pass>
2 status <msg>
3 send <sn> <msg>
h help
I didn’t recall seeing anything like this, so I decided to explore a bit. I replied with an ‘h’ to see if there were any other commands:
AIM -1/2-
Help
Send text msgs to 246246 to use AIM features. Examples:
status: status out shopping for new car
send IM: send jonny1 hi jon, I am back
AIM -2/2-
away: away at Moe's for lunch
avail: avail back at mydesk
add: add nancy123
del: del nancy123
b back to menu
It appears AIM is now allowing users to sign on and manage their accounts entirely over SMS. Niiice! I’m really starting to appreciate AIM.
AIM has done this for a long time (since about 2000).
In fact you can have your AIM messages redirected to SMS.
Live Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger offer similar services.
The configuration part is proprietary so you have to use each network’s native client to set it up, but after that you can go back to your usual client.
Each service will let you have messages automatically sent to you as text messages that you can reply to when you are not signed in.
Posted by foxmajik on April 14th, 2009.