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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.
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.
--
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