AOL is planning to open its email API for the third party developers to develop and deploy applications.

The plan is to open the content part of email using which developers will be able to build communications and social networking applications which can be added to email interface.  Richard Landsman, VP of Technology at AOL, says,

We are opening up the panel architecture in Web suite, which is the content portion of Web mail, to third-party developers by the end of this year.  Once that is opened up, technically, there is no reason why somebody cannot create some other IM mashup or some other IM client that can be plugged in there.

If AOL opens its mail API for third party applications, it will be the first one to do this in email segment.  Email data can be leveraged for not only developing communication and social applications but also for applications that are contextual in nature.  For eg: an application that delivers news in context to the email that a person is reading.

Though it will be a good move by AOL to make the email API open but the company will have to be ready for a backlash from the privacy groups which will definitely raise concerns over security and privacy issues.

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