AIM Fight

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

AIM Fight is an online program by AOL (America Online) designed to have two screen names on AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) compete for popularity. To do this, two screen names are entered into the webpage and then each screen name is run through an algorithm that runs through the buddy lists of everybody signed on at that particular moment and returns a score that represents the sum of the number of people who have those screen names listed as a buddy out to the third degree. As explained on their website, the score cannot increase by adding people to that user's buddy list, but rather having other people add the user to their buddy list. Depending on how well-connected these people are, the increase in the score can vary.

All bots will have a score of 0, as they are not included in the computed algorithm. Although the score represents a numerical sum of the people who have that screen name listed as a buddy and are currently signed on, their help page later states that the actual score is relative to how many people are connected to AIM.

[edit] Web API

The API consists of a single URL called by the Adobe Flash applet that returns the scores and ranks of the users. Additionally, it returns heights for the bars for the applet to show.

It is accessed at http://aimfight.com/getFight.php?name1=SCREENNAME1&name2=SCREENNAME2

By replacing SCREENNAME1 and SCREENNAME2 with the screen names of the individuals to fight, percent-encoded data is returned in the following format:

&success=1&score1=132451&score2=6004&oscore1=27241&oscore2=0&height1=99&height2=4

• success returns whether or not the fight was a valid one (0 if no, 1 if yes)
• score1 represents the score of the first screen name entered
• score2 represents the score of the second screen name entered
• oscore1 shows the rank of the first screen name if it is in the Top 5%
• oscore2 shows the rank of the second screen name if it is in the Top 5%
• height1 is the height of the first screen name's bar
• height2 is the height of the second screen name's bar

DosBubba from Slashdot was the first person credited to discover the web API used by AIM Fight and to publish it on a well-known site.

[edit] External links

• AIM Fight

[edit] Software Utilizing the API

• The Slashdot user jcuervo created a perl wrapper
• The Slashdot user DBergere wrote a shell script wrapper
• Mihir Kotwal wrote an ASP.NET interface for AIM Fight
• Justin Mazzi wrote a PHP script that lets AIM Fight operate in PHP.
• Tim Dorr wrote a Mac OS X Dashboard widget.
• John Fronckowiak wrote a new and improved Mac OS X Dashboard widget you can also read about the development details.