Jason Calacanis just wrote about AOL opening AIM a bit and Wil Wheaton followed with a great posts AIM bots. Specifically this bit:

"As I understand it, if you want to hook into the AIM API, you have to cough up a significant fee to AOL, so I don't see rampant 'bot development happening any time soon, but if AOL decided to dump the fees (maybe they could add a line after the message that says, "brought to you by [sponsor]" if they wanted to make up for lost fees, and sell the adspace) and a company like blogger or sixapart incorporated some easy to use code for their customers (add "wake up the bot" to "send trackbacks" or whatever), we could have an entirely new -- and very cool -- method of communicating with each other."

It's not only the API they want a "significant fee" for - it's the unlimited traffic on the bot. And by "significant" I mean "retarded." The way this works is basically this - if you have a AIM account you are allowed so many connections over a set period of time. Bots, by nature, can't fit into that (because lots of people might ping them realtively close together) at which point AOL steps in and says theres too much traffic on that account and bans it for 24 hours or something. Which makes it relatively impossible to have a bot without getting that restriction lifted. Without getting into the specifics of this I'll just say that I know several people who have built functional AIM bots but the monthly fee that AOL wanted to lift the limit of connections was so insane they axed the idea in a second. Insane by 2006 standards, insane even by 1998 standards. And by "axed the idea" I mean just shifted from AIM to another option. Which is exactly what other people are going to do. IM Bots are a cool idea, and if AOL is going to charge people people to run them, people are just going to move to Gaim or Jabber or some other option that won't.