Recently, for no apparent reason, my chat buddy list was knocked down from 110 users to 34. Afraid that I had lost all of those people, I tried to think of a solution. I knew that I had created contacts in Address Book that had included AIM screen names when I knew them. So using a Smart Folder, I isolated the contacts in Address Book by using the rule "IM status" "Is set."
But this was the tricky part. Dragging and dropping these contacts onto iChat or Adium didn't work. The only app that seems to be able to update your buddy list (that is, communicate with the AOL servers where the buddies are stored) is AOL's own AIM client. And guess which app doesn't seem to support drag and drop?
I tried to use some earlier hints, including one to use AppleScript to automate repopulating my buddy list on AIM, but it didn't seem to work. I tried going into AIM, adding a few buddies manually, and exporting the buddy list file (.blt) to understand the syntax so I could add my own buddies by editing the .blt file itself. However, AOL's AIM just kept crashing when I tried to load in the edited file.
Finally, I hit on the following solution which does work:
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20050716084852706