By now the web is buzzing with comments on AIM Blast. Don’t know what it is? AIM Blast is like an email list for IMs. You can create a permanent “blast group”, invite your friends, and then send/receive messages to/from all who are online at the time. It’s that simple. See the AIM Blast page for more details.
Blast groups appear as an automatically managed group in your buddy list. Once you have a blast group, just send an IM to the []-bracketed blast group buddy name.
You might have noticed that you need to reply with //1 or //2 when you receive an IM with the invitation to a blast group in order to accept or decline the invitation. It turns out there are many more commands that you can send to the blast group once you have joined.
Here is a list of additional commands you can send to blast group (NOTE: Most of these commands are handled by the host w/o being relayed to the blast group members):
- //off
- Stop receiving IMs. Use this when you are not interested in the current conversation. Don’t forget to send //on since this is in effect until then.
- //on
- Start receiving IMs again.
- //invite name
- Invite name to AIM Blast. An easy way to do this without having to go through the AIM Blast web site.
- //history
- Display last 10 IMs. This is an excellent way to check if you missed any recent blast messages.
- //stats
- Display stats
- //soundon
- Turn buddy sound on for the group
- //soundoff
- Turn buddy sound off for the group
- //help
- Get the list of // commands.
I found one more command that is not listed in the //help command and that is the //roll command to roll 2 six-sided dice; great for playing games and making random decisions via AIM Blast.
One last tip is that my Link Buddy plugin (also available from the AIM Gallery) has a link that gets you authenticated access to the AIM Blast web site so you don’t have to enter your password once you are signed-in to AIM.
