The services will offer personalised applications that can follow you around and become instantly available via instant messaging on any device. AOL, however, through its AIM service, has maintained the largest instant-messaging audience. This is a big advantage, as commerce applications and other Web services are increasingly accessed via instant messaging. Providing ubiquitous software services is on the agenda of many other companies, including Sun Microsystems. Sun's ActiveBuddy service has recently attracted much attention for its ability to let you ask questions of a remote computer via instant messaging and quickly get answers.
Web services are also a hot research topic at university labs.
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