Inside Facebook

Other desktop applications already let you read Facebook news feeds and send status updates back to the site, but it’s interesting when a big company turns on that feature. AOL’s AIM instant message service recently has, as TechCrunch spots today, in new versions of its Windows and Mac desktop clients. You can now read your friends status updates, view their photo albums, comment on them, and leave a status update from within AIM.

The move follows on AIM owner AOL’s earlier moves to create a new breed of social services, including a Meebo-style chat toolbar that let you talk to friends on web sites around the web. More recently, AOL released versions of its desktop app that let you read information from Facebook and Twitter but not send information back.

Both your comments and your status updates from AIM will appear within Facebook. However, AIM has not currently integrated Facebook’s own chat service, so you cannot chat with Facebook friends via AIM, unlike other desktop chat clients like Adium.

Still, with AIM’s ten of millions of users, perhaps these clients will help AIM become a sort of desktop portal to some of these other web services. And every new application that implements Facebook’s Stream APIs only increases the amount of content flowing through Facebook’s system.