TOC protocol

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "TOC protocol" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (July 2016) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

The TOC protocol, or Talk to OSCAR protocol, was a protocol used by some third-party AOL Instant Messenger clients and several clients that AOL produced itself. Sometime near August 19, 2005, AOL discontinued support for the protocol and no longer uses it in any of the instant messaging clients it actively maintains, such as its Windows and Mac clients for the AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ systems. However, it once did produce several of its own TOC clients, including TiK and TAC which are written in Tcl/Tk, TNT which is written in Emacs Lisp, all of which are open source, and a Java client originally called TIC which later became the Quick Buddy web applet. AOL also provided the TOC protocol specification openly to developers in the hopes that they will use it instead of the proprietary OSCAR protocol they use themselves. In July 2012, AOL turned off the TOC2 servers and it is no longer possible to connect to AIM using this protocol.^[1]

TOC was an ASCII-based protocol, while OSCAR is a binary protocol. In addition, TOC contained fewer features than its OSCAR counterpart. OSCAR provides such functionality as buddy icons, file transfer, and advertising.