The beta of tcp-im is up for Frontier and Radio. The amazing thing is that this allows you to create services on your desktop that can be offered to anyone that has a supported IM client or a tcp-im enabled version of Radio -- even if you are behind a firewall. It is going to take a little while to flesh this out, but the core functionality is there.

What this will allow you to do:

1) Allows communication via instant messaging between two copies of Radio. This could be used for instant outlining (the ability to share outlines you create in Radio instantly with people that subscribe), notification of updates to a weblog (instant news aggregation), and more. It also allows you to publish to your weblog via any supported IM client.

2) Build instant messaging bots. This means you can build applications in Radio that people can ask questions of via IM. For example, if you build a database of artist/album titles using Radio and connect it to this framework, people could input "Sinatra" via IM and get a list of albums he recorded.

3) It could, if there was a way to tap into the file attachment function of IM systems be a way to share file directories between subscribed desktops. This would be great for shared documents, photo albums, and multimedia directories. If you add a file to your shared desktop folder, everyone that subscribes to it would get it instantly.

As you can see, this is a major step on the road towards personal publishing and cross company group collaboration. Nice.