Until now. AOL is launching a preview of an all-new AIM today, and it has very little to do with the creaky old one except that it works on the same IM network. It’s so all-new that AOL even dumped its venerable “running man” stick-figure–who, let’s face it, screams “Old AOL that used to send us trial discs”–in favor of a hip little bot as its mascot.

Here are some of the major features of the Windows and Mac clients, most of which are new:

• The Windows and Mac versions sport a streamlined new paned interface that’s reminiscent of Twitter’s iPad version, with a vertical toolbar and panes that show your buddies and chats. It’s clean, straightforward, and nice.
• AIM now delivers IMs that people sent when you were offline and retains your entire IM history, giving it a real-time/non-real-time feel that’s vaguely reminiscent of Facebook messaging.
• It lets you do group chatting on the fly by IMing with multiple other people; they, too, will get the IMs whether or not they’re logged into AIM at the moment.
• It displays images and videos right inside a chat session”s word balloons.
• It has one-to-one video chat (but not group video chat like AOL’s AIM AV service.)
• It supports Facebook Chat and Google Talk as well as the AIM network.
• It’s dumped the Lifestream feature that tried to thread together all your status updates into one stream, but there are separate panes for Facebook and Twitter updates. For some reason the Twitter one isn’t working for at the moment, and these panes are only for incoming updates, not your own ones.
• It’s got a (non-customizable) news section with content from AOL properties such as the Huffington Post, Engadget, and TechCrunch.

Besides the Windows and Mac clients–which are preview editions that haven’t replaced their predecessors yet–AOL is launching a new version of the browser-based AIM, plus new Mac iPhone and Android apps. It doesn’t have any immediate plans to update the iPad app.

The single best thing about the new AIM isn’t any one feature: It’s that it finally feels like it was designed in the 21st century. I’m not sure whether I’ll stick with it, but I’m going to give it a try–and given AIM’s history in recent years, that”s an accomplishment in itself.

iMessage seems to essentially be like a BlackBerry Messenger for the iOS platform. You can send text messages, photos, and videos. Like desktop IM clients, you will be able to see when somebody is typing. Also, your conversations would be pushed to all your iOS devices, and you can choose to enable delivery and read receipts.

My question is now, what about interoperability? Will iMessage languish as an iOS only application with no way to contact the outside world? How about support for other platforms — say AIM — which its desktop counterpart iChat has supported for awhile.

We’ll let you know as we get more details…

But AOL showed off new desktop and iPhone versions of AIM this morning at TechCrunch50. The new AIM is distinctly less clunky and annoying, and it aims to be not only an IM client but also an aggregator of social networking info (aka your “lifestream”) from other services, too. The new versions officially launch next week, but betas for Windows and Mac are available right now and the $2.99 paid iPhone version is live on the App Store.

I’m trying the Mac beta, and it’s a Mac AIM client I’d actually use (hey, I’m chatting in another window even as we speak). It seems to lack some of the irritations that drove me away long ago, like ads popping up without warning. As for the social networking features, AOL has added support for Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Fickr, Twitter, and YouTube. It combines them all in a tab called Lifestream, lets you view all of them in one river of updates, or one service at a time, and permits you to broadcast your AIM status to other services whenever you update it. It also displays photos and videos from your pals directly in the AIM window.

There aren’t many things harder to do than elegant integration of disparate social networks–actually, I’m not sure if anyone’s really nailed it yet–and AIM’s implementation, in this beta at least, is imperfect. I’m not sure why you configure networks in your browser rather than in AIM preferences, for instance. And if you’re the type who loves high-powered apps like TweetDeck and Seesmic, you’ll find the AIM client’s support for other networks to be bare-bones at best. I doubt that any semi-serious Twitter user will rely on AIM as his or her only Twitter client, and about 95% of the things that make Facebook interesting (the full-blown wall, events, third-party apps, etc.) aren’t available.

The new AIM makes most sense for folks whose social lives are centered around AIM rather than Twitter or Facebook or another network. There are millions of those people, so it’ll be accomplishing something if all it does is make them happy. As it will be if you can use the new clients without gnashing your teeth and seeking alternative clients less likely to drive you bonkers.

I’m still looking for the ideal social-networking aggregator, but so many companies are working so hard on the challenge that I’m optimistic that I’ll find one that works for me sooner or later.

As for the new AIM client for the iPhone, I’ve downloaded and installed it–but every time I try to view my Lifestream, I get an error. I’ll check back later.

AIM network users, are you still using the AIM client? If not, why not? If you try the new versions, let us know what you think.

I took the new AIM for a spin, and found that notifications pretty much work as Apple described them last June. When you install and run AIM, it asks if you want to enable notifications:

If you click OK, you then get your IMs (or truncated versions) even when you’re not running AIM, as long as you’re logged in (they make a noise unless your phone’s in vibrate mode, and show up even if your phone’s off):

And can turn notifications on and off and specify how much detail you want:

Two quibbles:

1)  I wish AIM took me directly to the IM thread in question when I clicked the View button in a notification, but it takes me to my buddy list–maybe the iPhone will only launch an application from a notification, not take it to a particular state. (On the plus side, AIM does launch and connect really quickly, at least on my iPhone 3GS.)

2) I’m delighted to have push notifications in AIM, but I suspect there are times when I’m going to be in another app and won’t want to be bothered. As far as I can tell, the only ways to avoid notifications once you’ve enabled them are to shut them off in AIM or set AIM to log you off whenever you close the app. You can’t do it from the notifications themselves. (If the notifications had a “snooze button” I’d use it.)

One disclaimer:

I don’t know yet what sort of impact notifications have on battery life. Apple says they’re miserly, though, and they’re essentially doing what Apple apps such as the Messages and Calendar ones already do, so I’m optimistic.

I’m still hopeful that Apple will enable third-party multitasking at some point–I want to decide for myself if I can live with the power hit and potential stability issues– but this is a very useful stopgap…

The feature looks cool, and it’s exceedingly straightforward. When you’re in Gmail, your contact list will show a little green camera icon next to any buddy who has a Webcam, is online, and has installed the Gmail Voice and Video Chat plug-in (which works with IE 7, some versions of IE 6, Firefox, Safari, and, of course, Chrome). Click the icon, and you get a chat window with video in the botton right-hand corner of the Gmail interface. (You can also blow it up to full-screen mode.)

Here’s Google’s demo:

I haven’t used Gmail for chat much; this is a reason to give it a try…assuming that I can get the folks I’d like to chat with to install Google’s plug-in, that is.