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IMUnified: Playing Red Rover With AOL
Griz writes: "Looks like the bigger names in the IM business have come together to support a uniform protocol, and to rally behind IETF. AOL is noticeably absent. Check out IMUnified for more information." And practically speaking, it looks like a tough sell even for giant AOL to balk at implementing the same standards that will be available to customers of Excite@home, MSN, Prodigy, Yahoo!, AT&T and others.
Eric
--
Be who you are...and be it in style!
> AOL will never join one of these groups
Actually, they seem to have partially joined ICQ to AIM at some point. Why else can I log into AIM, which I just started using recently, using my ICQ uin/password? I think a better way to say it is they'll never join them in a way that doesn't help them.
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Take your current screen name, and add an @ and the service's domain name - for example, AIM user Foo becomes Foo@aol.com, while Yahoo! Messenger user Foo becomes Foo@yahoo.com (notice, different namespace = no conflict). Each user authenticates themself via their own service (MSN Messenger users give Microsoft their MSN Messenger lusername and password, not an AOL screen name and password), so you don't have a big inter-company security nightmare.
Each company sets up servers to relay IM messages and other information (such as whether a particular user is online) between their own service and other services. Each company then adds IMX records to their DNS zone file - Instant Messaging eXchange servers, used to relay IMs similar to the way MX records specify SMTP servers to relay mail for a particular domain. These relay servers authenticate each other based entirely on this DNS information, using a callback mechanism (server im.foo.com finds that im.bar.com is the IM exchange server for bar.com and sends a greeting, then im.bar.com checks to see that im.foo.com is the IMX for foo.com and sends a reply, then im.foo.com sends a final message indicating that the authentication has been completed). This way, anybody can set up an IM service and interoperate with all the other services, without having to register themselves with any centralized body - all they need is a domain name, which everyone has anyway.
It's been awhile since I read the spec, but that's the basic gist of it. Sounds good to me, and it's been submitted to the IETF, so I don't see why people are still pissed off at AOL. Remember, AOL came up with this themselves, voluntarily. Besides, as far as I know, they haven't done anything to try to prevent people from using other services. People just use AIM because AIM is better than the alternatives - either for technical reasons, or just because everyone else uses it.
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$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I personally have about 12 ICQ accounts by now - I generate a new one whenever their servers deadlock about my account for 12 hours because I'm logged out/on too often. My girlfriend had five accounts last time I checked, most of my friends have at least three. My mom has two, my grandmother has two.
As a matter of fact, I don't know anyone personally who has just _1_ ICQ account. Probably since if you have to reinstall ICQ you are screwed anyways - you don't have any of your contacts since ICQ is a client-based trust protocol, althought they can see you. At least with a new account you:
-don't have to remember a password
-don't have old people you removed from your list still seeing your presence online (and IP address).
As far as AOL submitting their open architecture design, it was horribly incomplete and more importantly - not implemented. AOL has had exactly zero percent participation in the IETF process, and basically submitted a quick draft proposal to help their Time-Warner merger case with the FCC. It met (by my estimates) about 50% of the IETF working group's requirements for a protocol, and would never be supported anyways because it only describes inter-server communication; no client communication.
Actually, MS is one of the *BETTER* players in the IM world. They publish their protocol spec, and ENCOURAGE people to write for it, to the extend of giving their blessing for anyone to *WRITE THEIR OWN SERVER* implementing the protocol.
It is a good thing (wow, that's scary) that they're involved in this.
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
ndpatel touches on two aspects of why I ditched AOL after six years of (mostly) satisfied membership. AOL shows no signs of going to an ad-supported service in the States even though AOL Europe stopped charging subscription. Considering the ad saturation they achieve -- it seems like every window and dialog box has a banner in it -- and the competition from ad-based free ISPs, I'm surprised AOL hasn't taken the plunge and gone free.Also, I still chat with people I know on AOL, but I detest having ICQ *and* AIM on my box. It just seems like overkill. (And worse yet, I've been thinking about mIRC too...stop me before I kill again...)
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
Well, I've created something similar. AIMIRC, a way to use AOL Instant Messenger via IRC.
AOL bought Mirabilis, so I'd assume that ICQ won't support IMUnified unless AOL as a whole changes policy.
MP3s were very popular before AOL bought WinAmp, you know.
- Every AOL account includes seven screen names, which you can use even if there are fewer than seven people in your household.
- You can amass as many AIM screen names as you want, and they never expire. I presently use two, but am credited with having five when I search their member directory with all three of my (past and present) e-mail addresses. The three that I don't use have never been logged into for over a year. I have known friends who have gone through 10 or 15 screen names, informing only their friends of their newest name so as not to be bothered by the idiots they left behind. (And let's not forget the spammers who register hundreds of thousands of ICQ accounts to send out porn site URL's.)
Eventually, AOL/AIM will claim more active members than the total userbase of the Internet.For more information, click here.
....coz they're the underdogs, just like they got themselves into that lame auction consortium with Yahoo et al when they all individually had zero impact on eBaY's market share.
The next step - assuming anyone cares if it is worth fighting over (there is no direct revenue stream) a Microsoft IM client will be installed as part of the WinME desktop, and with any upgrade of any MS product (just like IE is now) and will offer to replace AIM/ICQ for you.
The rest of the players are an irrelevancy.
If they did it right, then you would be able to ... say, invisible|ignore to *@aim. Of course odds are that however they do it, it won't be the right way
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Restating the obvious since nineteen aught five.
In my quest to see encryption used everywhere.. Don't forget that ICQ logs have been used in court before, and will be used in court in the future.
:)
So, I'm not against encryption in them. (Though Kerberos is a funky choice for this, I'm trying to imagine a KDC for tens of millions of users, and failing.
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Jabber may be open, and it may be a step in the correct direction (each domain runs their own service, which scales a heck of a lot better to the global Internet), but it's really, really icky on the inside.
XML is a bad choice for protocol messages. The use of XML carries far too much baggage for a lightweight/automated implementation. I've been thinking for some time about how a good Internet-wide IM system could be used not just to send silly chat messages back and forth, but also to be a method for client-server interaction. The XML message format requires each piece of software to contain an XML parser and also (from what I've seen) limits the kinds of data you can send back and forth. Why not do what HTTP does -- not care about the content, just specify a header format and let arbitrarily formatted data be attached?
In addition, Jabber makes the unfortunate choice of not wanting anything to do with crypto on the protocol level; instead, it wants client folk to slap OpenPGP on top of it. This is another bad decision in two ways:
That said, it's probably the best we've got right now, and in their favor, the Jabber folk have worked on this for a long time. I do respect them and their efforts (it's a rare open source project that is built to be more than just a copycat of some other software). I'm just not sure what they've come up with is what we need.
I guess they finally figured out that if all the clients could talk to each other, it'd be better for everybody. Well, every one of the players listed there anyway.
I mean really, between what all those people offer, there is a client type that can make anybody happy (unless you like ICQ's bloat anyway). Now if they could all talk to each other, that'd be even better, I could choose a client based on how well it works instead of which network has more of my friends on it.
AOL has no real interest right now because they have a monopoly to protect, however if this takes off (and as soon as they have it working I'm going to switch over to it, I really really hate AIM and ICQ) then we can end up with two big incompatable networks, oh joy.
Well, maybe somebody on the IMUnified side can make a client that doesn't suck, lord knows ICQ hasn't been able to do that since version 2.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
None of these companies really want any competition. As much as unity sounds noble I seriously doubt it's the driving motivation.
;)-- However, I doubt they intend to because: 1) I don't recall that Yahoo has any history of selling software. 2) The companies on the list that do sell software have never sold IM software.
If I understand it correctly, both the MSN and Yahoo instant messanging protocols had to be reverse engineered. If they wanted people to write competing clients the obvious thing to do is make the protocol public domain.
In the instant messanging world having an established user base is like having a sort of standard. Right now AOL has that and so for these companies it's time to gang up on AOL. But think for a moment... If microsoft was in AOL's position how can you be sure they'd care about Unity and interoperability?
And when these companies make their own standard protocol, what then? How do they plan on making money? No one pays for an instant messenging client because you can get AOL for free.
Are they going to sell server software? I would actually respect them if that was there plan.--especially if they made a GPL server that ran on LINUX
The only other conclusion that I can think of is that they plan to continue with their current business model of selling adds. AT&T I can picture as being interesting in a standard protocol for embedded devices and cell phones etc. But the others are going to sell adds.
There are two things you don't want to happen when you start selling adds. 1) You don't want people to switch to another provider. This makes me not expect to see Yahoo selling Instant Messenging servers that will compete with them. 2) You don't want people to figure out how to block your adds. This makes me think that yahoo does not want you to make your own client.
Writing this I think I begin to realise how this will be done. There are ways that blocking rogue servers and clients can be done. It will be called "Security." MSN will be interoperable with Yahoo because Yahoo will lease the bandwith and cpu cycles that it's clients will use on the MSN mainfraims. People without leases will not be welcome. This will be called "Unity."
Welcome to your bright tomorrow.
[Disclaimer] I plan to continue my computer science education and perhaps learn enough to program jabber applications some time in the future.
Nothing is simpler than writing a jabber client. A jabber programmer only has to deal with one unified protocol. I wrote a little bash script jabber client using netcat. It was crappy and I never botherred about parsing the return messages. But i could still add people to my roster, take people off, check who was on my roster, talk to people on the icq network. So I thought it was pretty decent for just a couple hours of tooling around.
:)
You could do what you are talking about with PGP pretty easilly with jabber too. The problem is that no one has done it yet. Probably a dozen different clients out there wouldn't mind canabalizing your code if you made the first jabber client that supported PGP.
The other problem is that none of the other protocols are advanced enough to be able to handle fairly complex stuff like that.
Jabber transport programmers face the same problem elsewhere as well. AIM for example does not support offline message storage. With MSN you can send little messages that say, "Fred has recieved your message and is composing a reply." but with ICQ you can't do that.
But I say go ahead and program the PGP enabled jabber client. Thousands of users will love you for it.
Personally, I never got into the IM thing. I always preferred e-mail or USENET or other forums for real discussions, since you can mull over what you're going to say first. What really seems odd to me is when people in the same town IM each other, instead of making a telephone call--it's much better to actually hear someone's voice, and it beats the hell out of typing furiously to get the same WPM.
But if you really have to communicate on-line in real time with someone--what's the matter with TALK? I miss it. People hardly use it any more, I guess because a shiny AIM interface is prettier than TALKing through telnet or whatever. Just never caught on with the non-geek and non-college-student crowd, I guess, especially with AIM out there. I pray for the day that AOL goes under, though I fear it'll never happen. "AOL: We're the Largest Censor on the Net, With Over 20 Million Subscribers Under Our Heel!"
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
Yes, AOL did submit an Open IM Design to IETF, but it just gives a high level discussion of what an IM protocol might be like; it doesn't say anything about how the AIM protocol currently works.
And according to this article by ESR, AOL released the AIM protocol, only to make changes to it once Microsoft began using it, in order to lock Microsoft out. So it doesn't seem like AOL really wants to be open with regards to IM.
For a full discussion of AOL vs. the rest of the world (with regards to AIM), see this article.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Give a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day, but set him on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
I've always wondered why someone hasn't designed an licq type interface to IRC. The infrastructure is already there and the protcols and clients are already open.
Why not just make a DCC CHAT ready client that works like the instant messaging clients?
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See the "..for smart people" banners Wired runs here? Look elsewhere guys.
And, any references to the MS anti-trust case are not valid here either, because MS weren't convicted of having a monopoly, they were convicted of using unfair business practices to quash competition unfairly. AOL haven't done any such thing, they've just created a product that everyone ended up using, for various reasons. It's a monopoly MAYBE, but monopolies are not illegal.
sig:
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See the "..for smart people" banners Wired runs here? Look elsewhere guys.
Okay, so are you goin to ask what part is illegal now? Since last time you asked right after I explained it.
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See the "..for smart people" banners Wired runs here? Look elsewhere guys.
CIS was always underpowered and overcharged (esp. in Europe). I jumped when they started playing games with email interconnect with various ISPs they didn't like.
Well, there's always going to be someone dissatisfied. I paid 16DM, about 5 Pounds nowadays, if you're British a month. Didn't seem so terrible to me. CIS was the place to go for technical info in easily accessible format as far as I was concerned, and the place to pass on my experience to others. It was one of the originators and leaders in this whole business. And even you might be prepared to agree that AOL's treatment of CIS users was crass in the extreme, if you were still around to experience it. I never had any problem with emails, btw
Not necessarily. XML parsers have now been implemented that are as small as 1.5K of code. And Jabber doesn't use full-blown XML with DTDs, automatic validation, and all that; it uses it for the sole purpose of creating a structured data stream.
The Jabber protocol would be excellent for this purpose. We are exploring such possibilities as embedding XML-RPC or SOAP messages in Jabber to promote client-server interaction over the same stream you might use for two-way human-to-human communication. The existing Info/Query mechanism in Jabber already does this, to a certain extent.
XML parsers are readily available, and, as I mentioned above, can be quite small. As for percveived "limitations" on data types, any text-format data can be expressed as XML and sent through a message extension. For binary data, we use the jabber:x:oob (out-of-band data) extension to pass HTTP URIs for data retrieval, which keeps the data from having to be sent if the receiving client does not support binary attachments.
First of all, Jabber already supports SSL connections (via the OpenSSL library) for transparent transport-layer encryption. The only drawback here is that not many Jabber clients support SSL.
That being said, I would like to see Jabber support crypto at a level in between the transport layer (SSL) and the end-user level (OpenPGP). But it's not going to be supported until it can be done right, as it's my belief that poorly-done crypto support is worse than no crypto at all. And I might also point out that competing protocols either use no encryption, or use something that's a total joke in terms of real security (e.g., ICQ). Then, too, there are US export regulations to consider (and we have very few non-US developers at this point that could mount any sort of Jabber crypto effort).
Eric
The preceding was my opinion only, and not the official opinions of Jabber.com Inc. or The Jabber Project.
--
Be who you are...and be it in style!
Excuse the existing CVS mess. I'm 100% to blame for it's current state :( WinJab has really grown and I'm still learning a lot about being in charge of an Open-Source project.. Its a steep learning curve, especially since I'm still trying to do my "real job" (tm).
I added a readme.txt yesterday (July 25) to the winjab CVS module that should hopefully resolve the component issues. If you have other issues, please contact me directly via email (check the sourceforge site for the addy).
I could _REALLY_ use the help and want to be as accomodating as possible.
I downloaded the CVS version of WinJab a couple of days after it's release (About 16-July-2000). It wouldn't compile.
You do expect a little bit of that with Delphi programs - missing components, etc, but this was crazy. I downloaded everthing I could find, and still it wouldn't compile. There was a whole set of XML stuff missing from CVS. God knows where to find that... (And yes, I registered the type library)
I code Delphi for a living, so I'd hate to think how much trouble other people would be having.
I left a message on SourceForge about it... now there are a whole lot complaining about that same thing, but no answers.
I'm a little annoyed about this, because I had a look at the code, and I saw a lot of things I could have fixed for very little effort. (Eg, they are auto-creating all the forms in the project at application start-up. That's a bad thing to do, but pretty easy to fix.) I wanted to help, but I couldn't.
So let's see if my math here is good:
IMUnified comes up with an open standard for instant messaging. Assuming a large enough user base recognizes this as a good thing (and they likely will as the next "upgrade" of Yahoo! IM will be both standards and backwards compatible) then the worry about getting messages to my cohorts (each of whom use different services) dissapears... but what else happens?
Well, if there is a single (or, almost single) standard for IM then writing a client that's useful becomes a much easier task. Having, say, a client which knows how to do MIME would be useful in a nubmer of ways, not the least of which is that PGPMIME is a handy way (and one of many) to move around encrypted dated with arbitrary encapsulation (in this case the IM standard protocol). Suddenly a secure IM platform is available with only a few days coding time, and if the poor sod on the other end of my message doesn't know how to interpret PGPMIME (or whatever else I use) all he gets is a nice ASCII block which is conviently labeled, oh, I don't know, "PGP Encrypted Message"...
hmmmm, I think I like where this is going.
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Behold the Power of Cheese!
Thanks for the response, Eric. I was beginning to wonder if I'd gotten swallowed up in the flood of crap that's been posted to all the stories lately. One of these days I'm going to relocate to Advogato and stay there. :-/
I'm not so sure that I'm comfortable with that. I know that with XML's namespace support, you can easily push XML-based formats inside of one another, but that strategy requires (AFAICT) anything that's not expressible in XML to be sent OOB. The OOB mechanism also would therefore require additional protocol support within the client, beefing its code up just a little more. If I'm understanding it correctly, it also offers a security risk where a sniffer could grab his own copy of the OOB file.
I would instead implement an inband message send/ack/reject strategy for short messages; and for larger messages or files, an offer/accept/reject message strategy that could transfer content either on the same channel (blocking further messages) or another channel, but without the overhead of additional transfer protocols.
This is cool, but it is not the be-all and end-all. I've been over the protocol on a few occasions in the past and I just recently looked at the whitepaper. I don't believe this addresses the issue of how a client attached to one server can authenticate itself to another server to the point of being able to subscribe to presence changes of a user of the latter server. If you had even a simple DSA implementation, you could have the user of the latter server say "I'll accept requests from this public key, this public key, etc." and authenticate based on that.
I admire you for taking this stand.
This is a fault of those protocols, and something that needs to be corrected by competing proposals. I respectfully submit that it is not an excuse to not implement cryptographic security and authentication. US policy is a pretty darned good excuse, on the other hand. :-/
According to ICQ's homepage they currently have over 72 million users. Last month C| Net claimed thatt AIM has 91 million users which may have changed since ICQ had 62 million at the time. All AOL has to do is make ICQ and AIM interoperate and any move by the remaining companies whose combined userbase dwarfs AIM's or ICQ's will be a waste of time.
Frankly I don't understand why people still hassle AOL, didn't they submit their Open IM Architecture Design to the IETF?
Otherwise, ladies and gentlemen, this will fail.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
But you can bed AOL will never join. AOL controlls the biggest names in IM: ICQ and AIM (which is really only so big because it is forced on all AOL users). But ICQ and AIM can't even communicate with eachother!
Also, I really do hope that this new network supports what Licq (the most used Linux ICQ client) has supported for a while: encrypted messages. If one person using Licq sends a message to another, the message is encrypted (if you turn the feature on). This functionality is ESSENTIAL to the growth of IM if it is ever to be used for business use (as their site suggests it will be).
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
After all, they were going against AOL head to head for a while by making MSN Messenger compatible with AIM and then they just gave up. How un-Microsoft like, it seemed back then.
So now they engineer this coalition(with the proper IETF backing of course) and they've got a real battle plan again. Obviously they haven't given up.
I wonder if messaging clients are something that could be complex enough that you'd get that software rivalry like there was between Netscape and IE. Does anyone care about the quality of their messaging client?
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
they deserve to be as big as they are for helping the masses
Tell that to the (ex-)Compuserve users. AOL took over a great service, removed all the interesting technical forums which made it what it was, and foisted their stupid mass oriented childishness on the few diehards remaining.
And less than a year after they bring AOL in line we'll see our first story about Micorsoft kerebosing up the new protocol.
You've read about these things in history class, kids. Now you can see it as it happens.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
AIM and ICQ work fine... I'm not getting charged for them... there are clients for lots of platforms... so who cares about making a standard to interoperate with them? Only people that see a "market" and wish they were part of it.
I really can't bring myself to care until the technology improves. When someone invents the fully distributed datagram-only version with automatic encryption and message signing and no central point of failure, I will be the first to sign up. (I've been muttering about doing that to IRC for years, I suppose I should sit down and code something--except I hate writing GUIs, and that is the part most people would notice.) Until then, unless AOL is doing something weird with my messages, or tries to extract a fee from me, what difference does it make that Micros~1 and whoever else can't join the party?
As long as we are going to make a "standard", lets redo the protocol from the ground up and fix all the flaws... and yes, I've seen the IETF draft standard, I think its fugly. Publishing standards for the existing tools would be nice, but what right has anyone to force AOL to open their protocols? Personally I don't see anything sinister in AOL acquiring Mirabilis and Nullsoft and Netscape... they just want to make sure those tools continue to exist, if only so that the value of the Internet experience of their own customers is improved.
Or does someone have evidence to the contrary?
Java: the COBOL of the new millenium.
What these companies want is to wrest the eyes and clicks of the countless AIM users into using their advertising supported clients. The "open" here is a misnomer that only means "interoperable" which is far from the same thing. It doesn't matter that the huge, dominating overlord is made up of a number of seperate organizations, it's still a huge, dominating overlord. The word for this type of union is "cartel." If you want a real open standard for messaging, you want Jabber. Jabber is an open standard, it's open source, and most importantly, it just makes sense. There are many reasons why it's better than the current adware messengers, but the best reason is that Jabber is a decentralized network. There's no single, monolithic entity that you must rely on to supply your connectivity. In other words, Jabber is built on the same model of the internet itself.
So download Jabber, but don't sign up at jabber.(org|com). No, instead you should start your own server (if you're able), or encourage your ISP to set up a local server. I mean, what would you rather be known as, "foo82351@jabber.com", or "yourname@yourhost.net".
Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from Gods.
Is it such a huge problem that clients generally aren't interoperable? Now, as much of a proponent of interoperability as I am (check my bio :)) I am not convinced that this is an area where it's a worthy goal to strive for.
AOL, essentially, owns the instant communication market. Instant Messenger has some 70 million users (or so they say) and I think we're seeing ICQ #'s in about the same range. I can't really blame them for being absent here. (Before you start blaming them for embracing and extending protocols, or closing out markets, please consider the evidence. Although AOL-Time-Warner is a frightening market giant, they have not done anything to illegally or unethically corner the instant messenging market.) Anyway, my point is, the odds are very, very good that anyone you might want to reach will use one of those two services. (And with ICQ's excellent cross-platform support, there's no excuse for them not to).
Additionally, AOL and ICQ (both owned, though not created, by the same company) use radically different, fundamentally dissimilar naming conventions. When you start introducing others into the fray, a unified protocol or client could easily become a hindrance or lead to complications.
AOL has more-or-less earned (or acquired) the instant messenging market. When something better comes out, I have no doubt that it will take the place of AIM or ICQ. Until then, though, incompatible standards shouldn't be foisted upon them.
yours,
john
I would highly encourage you to visit our site Jabber.org for all your development needs, and Jabbercentral for your end user related needs. Even more so we encourage you to download our server and seutp your own system, because we are similar in idea to how email works, anyone can run a server and talk with all the currently existing Jabber servers.
With ~20,000 users between just the public jabber.org and jabber.com servers we're growing extremely fast, and we hope that others will take part in our growth.
--Temas
Jabber ROCKS!
IM clients benefit from a huge network effect. The value of them increases as you get more users. (This throws a lot of economic paradigms out the window, but IM is "free" so it's hard to apply them).
AOL owns the two largest IM networks, AIM/AOL and ICQ. This system is an obvious one. Why, the rest of the players are tiny. If they merge and can grow, they can become significant. They need to count on users switching to the "standard" so that they can force AOL to play (after which, Microsoft takes over the non-AOL user market).
However, AOL still hasn't (to my knowledge, I mostly use AIM as my friends have all switched from ICQ) gotten ICQ and AIM to play nicely.
Now, if AOL feels any threat, then they merge the top two messaging clients and get even bigger network effects. Right now, AOL doesn't find it critical... they just don't put effort into ICQ and let everyone drift to AIM. If they needed two, they'd merge the databases.
AOL will never join one of these groups. These groups won't make a dent, as Instant Messenger/ICQ dominate the market. It would be suicide to work with this group. Who would download the AOL client if the Microsoft one shipped with Windows and was equivalent (good enough)...
Remember Netscape? AOL is too smart for this.
Alex