Software Surprises

If you’re interested in trying AOL’s newest Instant Messenger software, you’d better make room on your hard drive. The public beta for AIM’s next-generation application, code-named Triton, doesn’t put just the instant messaging client on your PC. When we downloaded the beta version of Triton, we also got AOL Explorer–an Internet Explorer shell that opens, full screen, to AOL’s AIM Today home page when you launch the IM client–as well as PlaxoHelper, an application that ties in with the Plaxo social-networking service. Triton also installed two programs that ran silently in the background even after we quit AIM and AOL Explorer. Read more