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IMUnified: Playing Red Rover With AOL

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the talk-to-me-baby-talk-to-me dept.

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.

2 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. Jabber by Temas · · Score: 5
    The protocol that we have implemented in the Jabber system, is designed just for this task, to bridge the current, and future IM services. We currently bridge to AIM, ICQ, Yahoo!, MSN, IRC, and others are in the works, along with other networks working on bridging into ours. What's even better is we are already completely open and free.

    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!

  2. Nonsense -- Network effect by alexhmit01 · · Score: 5

    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