The company, which is owned by Time Warner Inc, said it plans to release three APIs for the development of a few new features of Phoneline.
Phoneline, which launched in May, is a free service PC-to-PC VoIP service within its AIM instant messaging client. Users can add outbound calling to the service for a flat fee of $9.95 a month.
One the new features AOL hopes devs will work on is enabling various USB devices, such as speakerphones and phone adapters so that standard cordless phones can be used to initiate and receive calls within the service. Another is to add personalized ringback tones for frequent callers.
AOL also hopes devs will build new call management functionality into the service, including context and relevance-based call handling that could treat each call on the basis of rules that use Caller ID, online presence, calendar activities and so on.
The so-called Open AIM Phoneline initiative will begin at next week’s VON show in Boston. AOL said it would show examples using its APIs, including intelligent handling of incoming calls from iotum and personalized ringback tones from MyNuMo. Also, Mvox Technologies will demo its hardware device API with wireless speakerphones.
In addition, AOL will award $3,500 to the developer it judges to have the best new application for Phoneline, as part of a competition at the event, with $1,000 going to the runner up.
