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France Telecom To Support Jabber
AmX writes: "I've just seen on Jabber.com that France Telecom is going to invest $7 million in Jabber.com in exchange for a 23% equity interest in the company. Nice to see a big company supporting this technology. The details are here." With that kind of funding, perhaps Jabber really will become the next big thing. Not getting locked out of proprietary messaging systems would be a benefit to everyone. (Psss, don't forget jabber.org, too.)
Some things to keep in mind if you're a company thinking about using jabber (and I think jabber com/org is a good thing):
.com uses pthreads and .org uses pth (different thread libs)). The .com people are trying to add clustering and scalability that .org's code base doesn't have. I'm not sure if they're giving that back to .org
.org will continue to thrive (as opposed to before .com) now that its main developers are working for .com on a different code base.
.com server is relying on the .org server to do the msn/yahoo/aim connections). I'm saying this is good or bad, but it is definitely a factor if you're considering buying a jabber.com server and support to allow your customers to connect to aim/yahoo/msn.
1. jabber.com hired pretty much all of the original jabber.org developers.
2. The jabber.org guys changed away from GPL to jabber.com's own JOSL ("jabber open source license").
3. It is unclear (to me) if you contribute to jabber.org how/if your work will be pulled into jabber.com.
4. jabber.com is the "commercial" version of jabber.org. You pay them for it and they give various kinds of support. They've supposedly done alot of testing on it.
5. jabber.com is a completely different codebase than jabber.org. (for example
6. I'm skeptical as to how much
7. As of a month ago, the jabber.com server didn't support the msn/yahoo/aim connections because that code is contained in "transports" modules designed to work with jabber.org's vastly different pth-based code base. And my understanding was it would be a "couple of quarter" before they're in. When you try out jabber.com's open server and see that it does appear to connect to msn/yahoo/aim, the way they are doing it is they are running a jabber.org server side-by-side with the jabber.com server and doing a jabber-jabber intermediate transport (ie the
8. jabber.com won't sell support for aim/msn/yahoo because they can't "indemnify" it (or whatever) - they can't supposedly guarantee the connectivity. While it is true they can't guarantee the connectivity (until aim/yahoo/msn license it) it seems to me they can still sell it while explicitly stating they can't guarantee it. (I believe Odigo does - odigo.com is another IM solution that sells server, client, custom IM stuff).
And, don't forget about JabberCentral -- a great place for Jabber news and Jabber downloads.
Alex Bischoff
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
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I took a look at Jabber after seeing this article as it might fulfill some corporate needs (I've been looking for an intra-company IM for a while: Something that allows us an IM system without needing to use external servers or route data externally) so first I looked for the server, hopefully to run on a Windows 2000 server. "Contact our sales department at...". Any company that isn't willing to display simple prices for software products earns a big fat slimeball marker. "You wanna know how much it costs? I dunno...how much you got?"
Secondly it's always really suspicious anytime a product is opensource/freeware for Linux/BSD/etc., but for the Windows world it's closed source/commercial. It's like "We believe in open source so long as it is only applicable to a tiny minority of the marketplace. Otherwise send your checks."
Quote: Strange, I always thought that jabber.ORG defined the technology direction (rather than jabber.COM). I am happy for jabber.com though. $7 mil can definitely help keep them going for a while if used wisely.
To me, Jabber's strength comes from the fact that it's a distributed server system and not centralized. No one company controls the technology direction. Every company who implements the jabber server has complete control to their own userbase, and all devices that implement the jabber protocol should be able to talk with each other - this means that if we have IM implemented on all sorts of devices - Palm, Computer, Cell phones,
If a large company such as Microsoft... or even a consumer electronics company such as Sony steps in to support Jabber, it would go a loooong way to standardizing it. They don't even have to invest like FT... just step in and say, "We like this standard and will implement it in our future products."
Hmm. I installed it and everyone at my office was able to connect with no trouble at all. Could this be the dread pebcak error raising it's ugly head once again? It seems to work its way into every aspect of computing these days. I wish the Kernel group would do something about it.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
The coolest thing about Jabber isn't the ability to IM clients or the XML routing of their server. It's that it may finally be the directory service that will tie a string of independant services together. Anything will be able to send some sort of message to your directory listing and it will find its way to get to you, while you'll easily be able to have your software parse said message and let it determine if it reaches you or not. E-mail is the bastardization of a concept harkening back to the mainframe days. I send a message which gets stored in some form of memory for you to read later. This was then extended for use on the internet. The problem is that you have to login into a particular server to get your messages which by nature aren't realtime. Jabber/IM/... take the concept of delivering information a step further. Rather than get stored messages from a server, I can be automagically routed my messages by the server. Not only can data be routed to me but the sender doesn't need to know anything about my physical location. All of the client interfacing is done blind, only the server really needs to know anything about the clients. IM is only the tip of the iceberg; P2P sharing could easily incorporate Jabber as their person finding system.
Say you write a Jabber deamon that runs on Unix systems. People start writing Jabber modules for it to parse incoming XML. One of those XML packets could be a message going out to WidgetSoft users that there is an update out for WidgetWare and provides information to negotiate a network connection to a server to download the update. Jabber's got the potential to be a whole new way to get your system talking to other systems. Thats why the XML aspect is cool and important, IMing is nothing compared to the stuff you can make it do.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
So might any other piece of code. There's nothing special about Jabber that makes it particularly easier to port any more than any other IM software.
Not that I know much about jabber either, but you certainly doesn't sound like one that has studied it!
This is only conjecture, but this may be a preliminary move by FT to shut up the Jabber community when FT eventually decides to take the source and shut it away. They can always dangle the carrot of more funding and threaten to pull it away if anyone objects to their movements.
Now, who is pulling something out his ass here?!
FT can't take the source and run away with it - the code is open source!
Do you have some secret agenda? Do you work for AOL?
The goal of Jabber is to create an open (and better) standard for IM instead of having multible standards as we have now. Furthermore Jabber isn't limited to just chat, it could be used in a lot of other places, only limited by your imagination.
Read this if you would like to read a bit about what I mean.
Greetings Pointwood
What was the name of the terminal system that France was promoting when the Internet started to take off? They wanted to put one of these text-only devices in every home with a phone. They did chat and email and provided phone number lookups. But they also delayed the Internet in France.
I fear that the French promoting Jabber might just be the kiss of death.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
It's still very alpha and a lot of features aren't implemented, but KiT works reasonably well.
Feel free to try it out.. :)
-henrik
I know we've thought of using an IM client to handle internal office messaging before.
:)
ATM, we basically all use WinPopup. Which has very few features, a clunky interface and simply doesn't work if the person isn't running it at the time. The message doesn't get queued, it actually gets erroneously reported as delivered... Considering we're looking at overstretched 9x boxes, that happens.
An internal IM server would be lovely, if only I could find the details on how and the time to do it
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
You can use Jabber to talk to MSN, Yahoo!, ICQ and (when they're not being total dicks) AIM.
So, now you don't have to run a seperate client for each. At worst, you have to run Gaim and a Jabber client (e.g. gabber).
But, they want a computer user to be able to send to a cell-phone through IM. Or, for a cell-phone user to send to a Yahoo!, MSN or ICQ user. Of course, if AOL got off their butts, you'd be able to send to an AIM user as well, but for right now, they'll be busted... oh well, get a real ISP/IMP.
Cool, I had no idea. When I went poking, the interface for adding non AOL accounts was not too obvious, but I did set it up. I may end up using gaim because I mostly want Jabber access, but gaim is doing the AOL thing well, and so I may get my AOL access through that.
Cool ass news especially when things looked a tad bit downhill for *things open sourced* (Slackware news/Indrema/etc) for a second or two. Now they focus on their own servers so no one can block them (which should be one of the top priorities for them). Its nice to know that things in dotcomland aren't as bad as we would make them to be.. Sure its a bit shitty but it goes to show things do get rosy.
Well now we have to sit back and see how AOL will react this since now in theory, the company is profitable which means AOL can pursue legal avenues to take against Jabber should their clients continue to use their services (bandwidth/servers let's not start a threadwar)
Want Root?
Secondly it's always really suspicious anytime a product is opensource/freeware for Linux/BSD/etc., but for the Windows world it's closed source/commercial. It's like "We believe in open source so long as it is only applicable to a tiny minority of the marketplace. Otherwise send your checks."
Ok I don't really follow you here. Many commercial products have an open source port to them for the Linux/BSD clients, so I wish you could've been more specific so I could try to provide some insightful answer for you.
Anyways to your other post about searching for an internal solution for your company, maybe one of the reasons why they probably don't have any pricing is because it is a free program. I'm sure if you needed a specially ported client they'd be willing to talk a price. It would be shooting yourself in the foot as a programmer to simply throw a price on a product you haven't created (should they need to create a specially written client) so thats a possibility.
A non routeable solution you could look into if you want is an IM client StarMedia uses for their network. Its something similar to ICQ except a company created it for them. They paid for the servers, and both programs and server software. I wish I could remember where I read the article about the company that did it for them but that was a while back.
Want Root?
Imagine a network solely to be used for say... College Students working on medical research who need to interact with each other but don't want to have to access the internet via the normal channels, email, forums, etc., they could have a client specifically created by Jabber to cater to their needs.
Imagine the Genome research companies all over the world sharing information via those same routes, they too could have a specially created client for them which could do things like fetch information via an XML add on for them. Example, CometSystems has a neat "smart cursor" based tool which allows any word in a page regardless if they have a hyperlink, and pull up information on whatever was selected. So imagine if Jabber did the same only it catered to no one but the Genome companies.
Thats where corporations would come in, to add revenue. There are many more instances of corporate uses I could think of for them to make money off the client. Make an SSL based secure transaction client to interact with Amazon and other vendors, so if someone sent their friend a URL for music, the user would be automatically be directed (should they clink a special link) to a vendor to purchase that record, or book, etc., there are plenty of ways to make cash with it.
All your base are belong to Dubya
Want Root?
- Because current messaging is getting old. SMS is excellent for simple messaging between phones but thats about it. - Because they want to be able to deliver other applications over IM. - Because there doesn't yet exist an IM solution that will work on every device, and Jabber just might be the one to do that. - Because its an Open Standard so it is more likely that third parties will devlop applications for it which FT can rebrand without the expense of developing apps themselves - And probably a bunch more reasons that I haven't mentioned.
[Please type your sig here.]
This isn't news. The French have been jabbering away at the rest of the world since time immemorial, and I'm sure they've been jabbering away on French Telecom at least half as long. :)
(Best British newspaper headline ever: "The Further Machinations of Froggy Telecom")
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
I applaud the effort to make universal stardards and IM clients that use them. These are exactly the type of efforts necessary to make it work. But- is it me or am I the only person who is becoming less and less interested in being "instantly available"..? And more and more I find myself wanting ways to do the exact opposite, and make myself harder to find.
Something has been seriously screwy with the moderation these last couple weeks.
Personally, I think that jabber has a lot of potential as a business. They are basically the only open instant messaging protocol available. The ietf is thinking about creating a different open protocol but it will be at most a subset of jabber functionality and easilly reproduceable as a jabber transport. And anyways who knows when they are going to finish it?
Imunified.org also is talking about creating a standard. But all of those people use central servers and have add based revenue. I think when they are talking about a standard they only mean a standard that members of imunified can use and not an open standard.
Thus, if you are looking for a open im protocol with servers and clients that are already written then jabber is the only serious option currently available.
This is what jabber has to sell.
What the parent post said is true too. There are tons of applications for jabber besides just teenage girls chatting.
In the end though making money is far more complicated than just having something to sell. I have seen several grocery stores and resteraunts go out of business in this town. And everyone has to eat right?
7 million could go a long way, or you could spend it all in a year.
Download the Jabber server source.
Some of the prettiest C I have seen. Comments where they should be. Written modular and split up into parts that make sense. Simply and elegant memory manager. Hell we ARE talking about the server to jabber. If you dont like jabber.com server start your own server and get your friends using it!
Best of all, my company has looked at possibly using Jabber server side and open documentation for our own custom chat client. Grab the windows jabberCOM and hack up a quick VB client, instant chat the way you like it...
Jabber is some seriously cool stuff and is IM the right way IMO.
Jeremy
How is Jabber making money? Other than hoping people will invest in them, what do they have to sell that people *want* to buy?
What I'm trying to say is, why will Jabber.com not become a fucked company?
Peace,
Amit
ICQ 77863057
[o]_O
The best part is the idea of a presence engine. This thing knows that you are online. It can aggregate and integrate IM servers. The XML could be modified to store other arbitrary properties. It could do the same thing for letting music stream to the computer you are on (regardless of location). There is a real potential for all sorts of applications other than IM (Think GPS or the mythical badges you wear at bill gates house that lets the house change background music or art according to your tastes.)
IMO, that is what is the cool about Jabber, an XML (and therefore more easily extended) presence engine.
Think how this could be used with X10. (Frankly I'm still excited about the fact that my programable thermostat wakes me up with heat better than the alarm clock does with sound.)
- jabber has some nice server-side features for blocking messages you dont want to see
- you can run your own jabber server if you want
- jabber supports an irc gatway
- jabber has its own "groupchat" protocol section
regarding the scripting issue, theres at least 2 solutions to that. the first is obvious: make a scriptable IM client. the second is to make an irc module to jserver. there is already a very basic one, but its old and im not sure if it works with the latest server version.that means you could use jabber from your irc client (join #jabber, your contact list are shown as users in the channel, online people have ops etc.) and you can join groupchat channels on any server. eg myroom@myjserver.org, jdev@jabber.org, ircchan%irc.light.se@irc.myjserver.org.
you could even add server side channel bookmarks and nickserv identifys.
Ups, you're French apparently. Well, it's even worse... you're buying into stereotypes imported for ideological reasons.
A large part (maybe the majority) of Alcatel shares are on the French market, not on the American one. Alcatel opened a capitalization on Wall Street just very recently. In the meanwhile, Cisco and Nortel don't have market caps in Europe. But that's not the point: if you knew what you were talking about, you would never compare the sizes of different companies using capitalizations, but using revenues. Otherwise Yahoo!, just 12 months ago, was "larger" than Boeing: makes sense, doesn't it?
And where do you think ADSL will be in 5 years, compared to cable, RNIS and regular modems? In 10 years? If you seriously think that the cable will take over DSL, well, I'd be happy to bet on it :)
Oh, gimme a fucking break, will you!? We're talking about a $7 million investment, from the FTT branch. If you seriously think that the French government decides of such small investments for the remote FFT branch, you're completely clueless.
> As a moron that knows nothing about finance, are
> you suggesting that Alcatel is more Valuable
> than Microsoft whose revenue is 24B ?
Not "more valuable", but simply larger. For the moment.
> In really precise niche markets like electronic
> components.
Yeah, right. Like, for example, the tiny Alcatel which happens to be #1 on a tiny niche market such as ADSL, and which happens to be just bigger than tiny dwarves such as Cisco and Nortel combined. Niche markets, I'm telling you!
As far as FT is concerned, you obviously have no clue on the nomination process of the CEO, and on the decision-taking process inside these part-private part-state owned companies. You also seem to have a very peculiar source of informations for your percentage figures...
Oh, well. I suppose it's much more comfortable to see France through archaic cliches. Makes things simpler, doesn't it? What fun would it be to try o get a clue, if it forced you to ask yourself some serious questions?
> Is France trying to compete with other countries
> in todays electronics?
1st, France does very well in today's electronics, thank you. 2nd, it's not the French government who decides where FTT will invest its money, so THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT.
You may not be a conspiracist, but at least you're a stereotype-prone ignorant.
Dammit.
Taking a look at their site, not only do they plan on making money for the 'windows' version of the client, but if you pay attention to the pics shown, you can actually have your own internal jabber server.
.02 cents worth, which with the recent crash of the market makes it more like .000045 cents worth.
What that means is that companies such as cisco, could set up their own jabber server to allow their CCO members to instant message with a Rep regarding problems (maybe bad example because if your network is down, no chance of getting to cisco in the first place).
When IM (read: icq) started becoming popular, I could imagine big companies providing tech support via IM. What happened to that? I don't know.. maybe the technology was too foreign to some of the execs and what FT is planning to do with the software is making it friendlier to the big cheeses, which will mean revenue and a return on their investment.
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That of course is just my
I thought they were neat when i first got ICQ long ago, but for me, it quickly turned from an instant messenger to instant annoyer. I use irc for most online communications now, other than email. It tends to be more useful for conversations involving more than 1 person and you can run your own server, and not rely on the services of some faceless company. Plus, most irc clients are much more expandable thru scripting compared to most IM clients.
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
I'm just going to answer all of the why use Jabber questions here. :)
Security. Jabber has support for ssl and some clients (Gabber) have built in support for pgp. Also because it is really free and open you can set up an internal server if you want and never go to the internet.
It supports most of the protocols. I can still talk to my friends who use ICQ and can talk to my friends who are on Jabber and my friend who uses MSN from one client.
I have my profile wherever I go. Since contacts and all the other information are all serverside I can have the same setup at home, at work, on the road with no effort. Even if it was nothing but an ICQ replacement that feature would make it worth it.
It is open. That is a good thing by itself.
In short Jaber is good use it and support it add squadboy@jabber.org to your contacts.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
I wish I knew the source, but I read that also. If I remember right, the order of popularity is: MSN, AIM, Yahoo, ICQ. Yes, Yahoo Pager is said to have more users than ICQ. However the hell that happened.
You forget that ICQ is controlled by a corporation. Here are the 3 main reasons to use Jabber:
1) No corporate control.
2) No central server.
3) Open standard.
This puts Jabber in the same class as email. I run my own server and I can say who can have accounts with my system. If some other server goes down, it does not affect me. This is how IM should have been since the very beginning. You can whine all day about the number of users AIM has, or how cool ICQ is, but when it comes down to it, they all suck because they violate those 3 items above.
Let's not forget that Jabber also has some good functionality:
1) Serverside contact list.
2) Multiple chat transports (for evangelizing to other IM users)
3) Authorization that actually works.
Go, quickly! http://www.jabbercentral.com/
-Justin
You're right. My point has nothing to do with XML. It has to do with the general architectural goals of Instant Messaging systems. While web content is not intended to be real-time, and as duch, it is not a major incumberence to be told to go and get a client plugin of some kind to view content, it would be a major incumberence to the realtime nature of the system if dis-similar clients with dis-similar capabilities were used on the same IM service, for example, if I send a message to my buddy who uses a lesser IM client, and he is notified to updata a particular plugin in order to view currently incoming content, he is far less likely to take immediate action, then if my message to him imediately is displayed without issue. My point is, the minimum standards clients must adhere to would have to be far more stringent than the minimum requirements for something like a web browser.
--CTH
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--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
- Users' chat capabilities will be dictated by the client they use.
- The common method for making Open Standards profitable, is to develop proprietary extentions and enhancements to that standard (which make it no longer standards complient, as it was intended)
IM is not like the web. you can not expect to vive away a client then make money on selling a server with enhancements. The real-time nature of IM serves to magnify the problem that the web has always encountered, relating to the capabilities of the browser with respect to the server, or the content being served. On the web, you'll occasionally see pages that indicate they require special featured of IE or NS6 or what have you. If I recieved an IM message, intended for my viewing in real-time, and instead of being able to view it, I was instructed to get a newer IM client with more capabilities, this would not only srve to agrivate me, it would also serve to completely destroy the valie of an Instant Messaging system, because the content was not delivered in realtime as is the goal of IM.On the web, this is a minor annoyance, because vary little content is intended for realtime viewing (with the exception of some streaming audio/video content, etc.), but inthe IM arena this would be a serious problem.
So, here's my question. Where's the revenue stream? Is it in systems integration? It's certainly not in server sales alone. It might be in the provision of the service as a whole, but I don't see anyone getting away with charging a per-message fee at this point.
The only viable business model I can see is in integration, "We will integrate our IM system with your home automation system, or the hospital's heart monitors" or whatever. I can see possibly selling 'conduits' connecting existing email infastructures, paging systems, and monitoring solutions with a freely provided OSS IM solution, but that's kind of a streach.
Don't get me wrong. OSS IM solutions are great, but I'm not sure I see where the revenue streams are going to be coming from.
--CTH
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--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
I dunno. I work for a large company and use IM for many business related things. In fact the only thing I have ever had to actually call for support for (aside from some internal tools) has been the IM. That would be tough-- support the IM via IM... ;)
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Seriously, everyone's more into cell phones and WAP there. Got to have been around 20 IPOs in recent months there connected with software and hardware for same.
The cash cow is cable services at the moment, and FTE isn't about to kill the current services just to support open source, even if they're the major adopter of such.
[just back from two weeks vacation in France - Paris, Nantes, Bordeaux, Nice, Antebbes - and interesting seeing how stuff is used there on the ground]
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
This is the most amazing news of the year. France Telecom (FT) is a huge piece of dumb crap. I can't see theses people investing money in anything not being extremely profitable. Some background: FT is the historic telcos in France. It was a monopoly until 2 years, and there are going very well, thank you (much like the Baby Bells vs the others in the US). And it also seems that they will be the only DSL provider around next year. I'd like to remind everyone that local phone is still $1/5 min in France. Yeh that's a complete ripoff and that why France is lagging behind the US in terms of Internet Access. Yes they invented the Minitel in the 80s (a dumb terminal) and it was kind of nice and cutting-edge, but right now it's a huge brake to the development of e-commerce in France. The Minitel has a really nice business model: pay as you go, anywhere between $1/10 minutes (public services) and $1/1 minute (professional services and porn). So it's a huge cash cow for everyone involved. I would like to see Jabber take over the world, but I'm quite sure that FT got a really precise idea about how to make this thing profitable, and it might not be compatible with the open-source philosophy of Jabber. Or maybe they don't have a clue and are buying stuff, well, because the investment fund is not empty yet. By the way, FT is known to spend the money they collect from there bounded customer in stupid and politically oriented investments... So wait and see.
Nobox: Only simple products.
>1st, France does very well in today's electronics,
Well, kind of... In really precise niche markets like electronic components.
When french companies will pay their engineers more than $30,000 a year (no kidding), maybe...
>2nd, it's not the French government who decides where FTT will invest its money, so THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT.
FT used to be totally under control: FT was directed by the French Government. Now, it's different: theorically they are a private company, but the state owns more than 50% of it, the CEO is designated by the French Government and strategic decisions are always *discussed*... FT is a huge cash cow for the state.
But $7 million is NOTHING for FT, so I guess it's just a move from a senior manager.
Nobox: Only simple products.
Yes, the technical aspects behind IM aren't rocket science.. But most of the money isnt for the technology, per se, as much as it is simply to gain the services/support of the Jabber developers who have already clearly built a good, working product.
Its true that there's many programmers that could knock off a usable IM solution in their spare time over a couple of month period -- but how do you know how good their solution will be until they actually do it? Jabber, at this point, is pretty well proven and the developers now have a ton of experience dealing with all the different open and closed IM protocols.
That's what the money is for.
- Because current messaging is getting old. SMS is excellent for simple messaging between phones but thats about it
So they want a replacement for messaging. Makes sense.
- Because they want to be able to deliver other applications over IM
Sounds like a good idea, but how much functionality are you looking for? And realistically, how much functionality can you provide over IM?
- Because there doesn't yet exist an IM solution that will work on every device, and Jabber just might be the one to do that
So might any other piece of code. There's nothing special about Jabber that makes it particularly easier to port any more than any other IM software.
- Because its an Open Standard so it is more likely that third parties will devlop applications for it which FT can rebrand without the expense of developing apps themselves
First, it's doubtful that 3rd parties will develop anything for Jabber just because it is Open. Second, FT doesn't gain anything by donating money to Jabber, at least anything they couldn't have usurped without paying.
- And probably a bunch more reasons that I haven't mentioned
Because you're pulling these reasons out of your ass?
This is only conjecture, but this may be a preliminary move by FT to shut up the Jabber community when FT eventually decides to take the source and shut it away. They can always dangle the carrot of more funding and threaten to pull it away if anyone objects to their movements.
Dancin Santa
The technology already exists to send messages back and forth between mobile devices. Unless FT is looking to build some sort of proprietary version of Jabber, there doesn't seem to be any reason for them to have bought it in the first place.
Dancin Santa
wow. they're up to 100 million now. my number is under 1,200,000... grown fast. anyway, aim has 29 million actually aol users, something like 39 million standalone aim users, 2.8 million compuserve users and 34 million netscape.com users (thereby tying them into aim)... and of course, they own icq too. aol owns instant messaging.
Every once in a while I like to masturbate a new word into my vocabulary, even if I don't know what it means.
i may have mispoken. the protocol itself, i cannot vouch for - however, its feature set is pretty complete, and it *does not* require a server, once connecting, to talk - all communication is peer to peer, which avoids server lag, etc. of course, this can be a problem too, and that's why icq includes the option to send through the server. they've been doing this for years, but i hear aol is implementing this feature now too...
Every once in a while I like to masturbate a new word into my vocabulary, even if I don't know what it means.
i'll agree with you about icq being superior though, but the fact of the matter is this - it's too complicated for the average person. they have no interest in seeing a person's ip address - they just wanna talk with their friends that use aol.
it's a shame, too. because icq *is* superior, and licq is an excellent client, but i find myself using gaim most frequently (although i have both of them running at all times) because all of my friends use it. and not because they use aol - but because *their* friends do, or their friend's friends do, etc. that's why i tend to cheer on the development of gaim more than licq, and that's why gaim is developing faster than licq - the userbase is bigger.
icq is a superior protocol/setup. but it's just not as widespread. and it never will be. that's why aol bought it - so they didn't lose revenue to it.
Every once in a while I like to masturbate a new word into my vocabulary, even if I don't know what it means.