This is presumably using Adobe's new RTMFP[1] which means it's all P2P. Same way Chat Roulette works.

It's extremely easy to create this kind of thing now (as in hours of work for a simple version).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Time_Media_Flow_Protocol

Are there any good open-source implementations?

assuming you mean RTMFP: https://github.com/OpenRTMFP/Cumulus

Last time I checked, red5 was trying to reverse engineer the protocol. Not sure how far they are.

Of what? Flash? RTMP? 4-way video chat?

If you want all that in a single package, no.

What if I want to record. Help please?

"note: this app is for internal AOL use only"

I wonder if this is some brilliant marketing ploy.

It's definitely a ploy. If they wanted to test it with just their employees, they would have put it behind their firewall.

Back in the late 90's and early 00's, I remember discovering a bunch of "internal" AOL sites. Even after posting about them on forums, AOL didn't seem to care much (unless they could be used to steal accounts).

And would have forgone the splash page.

unless they mean only for use on AOL's network, and not cross-network like with gtalk or msn chat. It's worded just awkwardly enough that I could see non-techies making that wording mistake.

Sometimes I look at websites with cloud backgrounds and think they're moving. This time I was right!

If this is done right AOL would adopt a standard that would allow interoperability.

The way its looking right now in the voice/video messaging scene is we're gonna have communication islands and the only way to reach someone is to run five different service's clients.

Isn't this what XMPP (the protocol google uses for gchat) is all about, at least for text? (c.f. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Messaging_and_Presen... )

Is A/V over XMPP standardized?

Yes. Google did the original work for Jingle, but passed it to the XSF for standardization. That work has been done for some time and implementations have been appearing in various places.

Even so, I suspect it will be a long time before Skype, Apple, and everyone else does anything but try to set their own standards.

This works over Flash, which means you're confined to RTMP... while it's possible to tunnel a more standard protocol on top of that and open up the other end to third-party clients, (or simply gateway to $protocol), I doubt they've thought that far out yet.

There are pragmatic reasons for the fragmentation we're seeing, although those don't necessarily correspond to the customer's favored outcome. Federation reduces the stickiness coefficient of your product, and forces you to design your application around a protocol that may not fit your needs ideally, cf. Skype's supernode architecture.

The fellow in the middle of the photo is Frederick Van Johnson, host of the great photography podcast This Week in Photo.

Wow, I'd use this over skype now.

re: skype/facetime - if this RTMFP thing picks up, seems like there could be tons of services like this soon. no need for facekype. In some ways, this has been around for a bit, just maybe not a cleanly/easy to develop. tinychat anyone?

Hm, some competition for http://www.faceflow.com and tinychat.com :)

That screenshot is just begging for a caption contest

hasn't iChat had this for several years now?

Only on macs and only on the Desktop.

Pretty sure iChat could video chat with AIM on PCs for years, haven't tried in forever though.

You can do a one-on-one chat between Macs on iChat and PCs running AIM, but you cannot do a three-way chat.

This is very cool. Facetime competition?

<sarcasm>Definitely, I'm sure Flash for mobile device will be so much better very soon.</sarcasm>

what's up with the "note: this app is for internal AOL use only" tag?

TechCrunch posted about it here: http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/05/aol-aim-av-chat/

Looks like AOL is still internally testing it, but TC decided to spill the beans.

Or someone made an elaborate marketing decision to not have the email sent to TechCrunch team so that then someone internally at aol would leak it to TechCrunch and in turn TechCrunch would be excited to leak it to the public. Thus making everyone seem special and 'in the know' and thus greater chance of it being shared and talked about.

Like here.

Or they explicitly requested TechCrunch to write about it and say it was "leaked" to build up hype.

shhhh