Trillian Won’t Heed AOL’s Message I’m sort of torn on this one. AOL is providing a service, they own the servers, they pay for the bandwidth. This stuff is not free. It’s up to them to decide if what they are providing is an open network that people can write other clients for or not. The only real chance they have to recoup their costs is through pushing advertising out to the client software. Now, if they were smart, they would write an API that allowed other clients to become certified for their network which required the ability to push ads out to the client. Then they wouldd get the best of both worlds, other people would be doing some of the innovation work for them, and they would still get the advertising revenue from the third party clients.