Thursday, March 13, 2008

iPhone SDK and TinyBuddy IM stats

Two quick things:

1) Apple released the iPhone SDK last week, and as part of the announcement, AOL demonstrated an AIM client that was built with the SDK. Hopefully AOL will continue the AIM client development so that in the June timeframe there will be a "real" AIM client for the iPhone/iPod Touch.

If you want to see the AIM client demo part of the announcement, you can view the video from apple.com. Go to this link:
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/iphoneroadmap/

Then click on "View Presentation". Warning: this link may not be valid over time. The video you want to watch should be titled "Apple March 6 Event". The AIM part is around the 52 minute, 51 second mark.

Rizwan Sattar from AOL does the AIM demo -- we work in the same office! Rizwan did a great job with the demo.

2) With the Open AIM launch last week (http://dev.aol.com/aim), I now get stats for how much my API key is used. This in turn gives a rough idea of how much TinyBuddy IM is used. For a 7 day period (last Wednesday to this Wednesday), the stats are:

Peak Simultaneous Users: 183 (how many people used it at one time)
Sessions: 116,943
IMs Sent: 513,384
IMs Received: 566,301

So every minute (averaged), that equates to:
11 sessions per minute
50 IMs sent
56 IMs received

That is certainly much better than I thought it would be. It is nothing like the usage of a full AIM client, but I'm happy to see that much usage out of a fringe product. Thanks for using it!

Although, I hope in the June/summer timeframe there will be a "real" AIM client that works natively with the iPhone and iPod Touch so we do not have to suffer with the limitations of the pure web-based approach that TinyBuddy IM uses.