Open Letter To Rob Pegararo

In response to Rob's less than fair analysis of AIM Triton in his December 4th review in the Washington Post:

Rob,

I felt your analysis of the free Triton client was at times a little unfair and inaccurate.

The client is absolutely free - how do you expect a company to make money if they don't either sell the product - or display ads. Your comment about the invasive ad in the buddy list is valid, however the very same ad is present in the legacy AIM client as well, and has the same multimedia goo when you mouse over as it does in the legacy client. (Unless of course you broke your TOS and installed a tool to remove the ad?)

What did you mean by the buddy list taking up an entire column of your screen? Who in their right mind doesn't know how to resize a window? You can collapse the pane in the bottom of buddy list to tuck way the radio with a single click. How difficult is that? Even better, in the settings you can chose to get rid of the buddy list ad all together and move it instead to the IM window...an ad will appear at the beginning of each conversation but will scroll off the page as the conversation proceeds. This space is normally occupied by nothing but whitespace..so this approach is the least invasive as any ad could be imho. Have you seen the ads on google.com or with gmail? I don't see how this is much worse. You can even collapse the ad in your conversation if you'd like.

Additionally you are incorrect about the multiple lines in the input field...if you continue to type - it will auto-expand for you, so you can view more than 2 lines.

Your review certainly contains truths...but in traditional Washington Post towards AOL fashion - you tend to focus on the negative. If you had actually been factual across the board instead of misleading folks in a few places (due to inaccuracy or just plain naivete), it would have not seemed so spiteful.

Regards,

Corey Lucier

PS. The buddy icon and spell checker did not escape anyone's attention. There is code already written to 1) drag and drop images onto the buddy list to instantly set one's buddy icon - something nobody to date does - and 2) inline spell check --however our GM deadline prevented the features from getting in - look for them in a future incremental update.