-
Personal People Finder
Hi, I was thinking about writing a personal people finder. It will scan all IM services and then scan the .com phonebooks.
My only real question is for something like AIM they have no people finder in there site only in there software, so is it legally ok to send packets to there servers for software thats not theirs.
-
AOL allows third parties or did allow them to use a protocol called TOC, but i dont think it's officially supported anymore, and i dont know if it gives you access to the Directory Search functionality... if not your only options are a liscense or to look up a site on the OSCAR protocol... which will be reverse engineered information, but legally i dont think they can touch you because they're are a ton of non AOL endorsed AIM clients that use it... and AOL is well aware of them and seemingly can do nothing.
also they did actively attempt to block third party software using the OSCAR protocol from communicating with their servers... which all have been worked around.... but i havn't heard of any attempts to do so lately...