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Will Instant Messaging Ever Unite?

Posted by Hemos on from the probably-not dept.

scallion writes "An article in Technology Review titled Getting AOL To Talk To MSN points out that currently the world of instant messaging is "as factionalized as Afghanistan," then asks, what will it take to unite all these individual IM networks under one umbrella?"

30 of 423 comments (clear)

  1. and the answer is... by jaclu · · Score: 5, Informative

    what will it take to unite all these individual IM networks under one umbrella?

    jabber.org

    1. Re:and the answer is... by arnie_apesacrappin · · Score: 2, Informative
      what will it take to unite all these individual IM networks under one umbrella?

      The best solution, has, unfortunately, been destroyed.

      One Ring to rule them all,
      One Ring to find them,
      One Ring to bring them all
      and in the darkness bind them

      --

      Still, with a plan, you only get the best you can imagine. I'd always hoped for something better than that. -CP

    2. Re:and the answer is... by tzanger · · Score: 3, Informative

      What could does it do me to sit on Jabber and talk to myself when I can't communicate with my buddies on AIM (since aim-t was still broken last I checked due to IP blocks by AOL)?

      Do what I did; set up your own Jabber server. aim-t and whatnot gets blocked because there are too many people on it and it becomes a target. Setting up a Jabber server isn't all that difficult and takes up next to zero bandwidth. Find a buddy, use a work computer (sell them on the idea of using Jabber for IM)... It's fun, and it works. I run Jabber with aim-t, msn-t and icqv7-t.

  2. it's called TRILLIAN! by T.Monk · · Score: 4, Informative

    Trillian rocks... combines 3 or 4 different IM into a single, skinnable interface, and even manages to keep up with AOL's shennanigans...

    1. Re:it's called TRILLIAN! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative
      T.Monk wrote:Trillian rocks...

      Lessee... M$-Win only. Closed source. Doesn't support Jabber (last I looked). Major bloat (I'm told). Constant fund-raising (last I looked in on 'em).

      I guess we have different ideas of what features result in something "rocking" ;).

  3. Miranda! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Jabber and Trillian have been mentioned, now for Miranda: http://miranda-icq.sourceforge.net

    Support your open source brethren! Help develop an AOL or MSN plugin!

  4. Re:It'll never happen with the big guys by Mwongozi · · Score: 4, Informative

    Actually, for a long time, ICQ was the only instant messaging platform. AOL bought Mirabilis, the creators of ICQ, shortly after the development of AIM.

  5. Trillian? Pfft! by Phantasmo · · Score: 2, Informative

    You can get all chat windows combined into one - it's called gaim.

    --

    The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
  6. Answer from IETF is ... SIMPLE ! by ice_sk · · Score: 2, Informative

    The answer from IETF is a workgroup called SIMPLE. This working group focuses on the application of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP, RFC 2543) to the suite of services collectively known as instant messaging and presence (IMP). The IETF has committed to producing an interoperable standard for these services compatible with the requirements detailed in RFC 2779 and in the Common Presence and Instant Messaging (CPIM) specification, developed within the IMPP working group. As the most common services for which SIP is used share quite a bit in common with IMP, the adaptation of SIP to IMP seems a natural choice given the widespread support for (and relative maturity of) the SIP standard. http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/simple-charter.h tml

  7. Don't forget gaim by danrees · · Score: 2, Informative

    Trillian has already been mentioned for win32, but there's also gaim for Linux/GTK - it supports almost every instant messaging protocol under the sun, and doesn't feature the same bloat as the likes of ICQ.

    Gabber's also pretty good, but since no-one uses the Jabber protocol, it seems pointless to register...

  8. Answer: the end of the world. by b.foster · · Score: 5, Informative
    Companies are designed from the ground up to act in their own best interest. With that in mind, let's take a look at why the major players in the IM market might not be too keen on a common, universal IM standard.
    • AOL
      • AOL is the undisputed leader in the IM market. They were the pioneers; instant messages have been a part of AOL since the service was called AppleLink back in the late 1980s.
      • AOL does not need any more users on its IM network. It does not want more users on the network. Everybody who is anybody has an AIM account.
      • Facilitating compatibility with other IM networks would cost AOL money unnecessarily. They would not be able to install their spyware and ads on your system. And they would not be able to use the competing services to try to get you to join AOL. The economics of the situation favor the current approach.
    • MSN
      • Microsoft would also lose out from giving up the right to blast ads and spyware at all of the users of its network.
      • Microsoft fully intends to leverage a monopoly in the instant messaging arena to further its desktop and server monopoly. At that point they will begin charging for service. This would be less effective if they opened their network.
      • Keeping their network closed encourages more users to get Passport accounts, which Microsoft uses to harvest personal information and sell consumer dossiers and mailing lists.
    • Jabber
      • Jabber.org would benefit from an open IM standard. Unfortunately, Jabber.com would lose its only competitive advantage and would quickly go out of business.
      • Decentralization would make administration simpler, but would be unnecessarily incompatible with the centralized models of AOL, MSN, and (to a large extent) ICQ.
    b.
    1. Re:Answer: the end of the world. by X-ViRGE · · Score: 2, Informative
      Um, except that:
      • Jabber is an open IM standard. If there's anything Jabber's protocol is, it's open. You may argue that it's not a standard, but that's the reason the Jabber Foundation was formed. We're fighting quite hard to make the Instant Messaging and Presense Protocol (IMPP) group of the IETF make up its mind. We've submitted Jabber to the IETF twice and are continuing to press forward. The IMPP group has been in a standstill for *years*
      • I'd argue that the only useful open IM standard would be a decentralized one. Keeping IM centralized makes no sense if you want everyone to be able to talk to one another
  9. They have united... sort of. by Vernalex · · Score: 1, Informative

    There are many multi "transport" instant message clients out there, the largest being Trillian ( http://www.trillian.cc ) and Jabber ( http://www.jabber.org ). While it is true that they're not supported by their respective owner (AOL, Yahoo or Microsoft), they do function properly. In the past Microsoft tried to block them but recently has supported Trillian by offering them the future specifications of the MSN protocol (although I am sure it somehow is meant to undermine AOL), and AOL has given up trying to block the sneaky clients. I doubt they will ever work together (at least not until an evil and scary merger between AOL and Microsoft happens). I use Trillian personally and I have used Jabber in the past and I feel they are quite professional.

    --
    "The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true." --James
  10. Thanks for not reading the Web page by autechre · · Score: 2, Informative


    I guess you didn't bother to check and see what protocols Gaim actually supports, preferring instead to make an inference based on the name of the program. For the record, it supports MSN, Yahoo, IRC, Gadu-Gadu, Napster, Zephyr, Jabber, and ICQ.

    Everybuddy (www.everybuddy.org) is another multi-protocol chat client available for Linux. It can actually receive files from AIM users, which Gaim can't, though I don't really worry about that too much. And I never worry about being able to send files using my IM client; that's what Web server software does.

    --
    WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
  11. How to stop MS Messenger from *ever* starting by Namarrgon · · Score: 3, Informative
    I had this. Solution: Q302089. You will never see it again, guaranteed :-)

    If you're not running WinXP, get TweakUI (Power Toys, MS Downloads). It's very helpful for stopping those annoying programs that insist on starting every reboot.

    --
    Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
  12. Re:It could be better by kisrael · · Score: 3, Informative

    I disagree....AIM is *the* best interface I've seen for Instant Messenging. Yes, out of the box it's a bit "excessively synergized" with a special home page, stock tickers, headlines, etc, but they have done an excellent job of making all that stuff easily "turn-offable" in the configuration. When they released a new version that probably made some behaviors easier for newbies (i.e. how minimizing, closing the window, and signing off/on are all linked) they made it easy to restore the old behavior that people may have gotten used to. The interface is feature rich (in terms of buddy icons, fonts, colors, the frickin smiley thing, blah blah etc) but the complexity is well hidden.

    Compared to the old interface for ICQ, it's heavenly. I think they've really done their usability homework (my only gripe is that if I've cut and pasted some text from another someone else's talk, it copies the color and formatting, and the only way to get back to my default text is to cut and paste some of my own text...) Admittedly, I've only played with AIM, ICQ, Trillian, and Exodus, but AIM is the cleanest interface I've seen.

    --
    SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
  13. Re:Sorry, Not Jabber. Or Trillian. by pointwood · · Score: 3, Informative

    Quote:
    === Cut ===
    That is, you may have a single client, but you've still got multiple AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo! accounts. Maybe even a jabber account (and that one isn't even universal -- it's based on wherever your account's server).

    What is needed is, essentially, SMTP for IM. A way to embed a service name/address into the message traffic. So that, for example, a user "harry.truman" on MSN could send, using MSN, an IM to "aim:dcooper", and have it go through. A little quiet reflection should convince you that this is a server-side problem, and one the current services haven't addressed. (I'll leave the question of why, be it technical, political, or economic reasons, to others).
    === Cut ===

    Huh? Isn't that exactly what jabber do? There are several jabber servers on the net and you can run your own if you like. It works very much like email and your address looks like an emailaddress. You don't have to be on the same jabber server to talk to each other.

  14. Jabber? Try SIMPLE. by chefmonkey · · Score: 5, Informative
    Jabber, unfortunately, has a number of weaknesses. It was not designed for security (for example, it sends passwords as clear text), and the model it uses is inherently vulnerable to DOS attacks. And you'll never convince AOL to use it.

    On the other hand, SIMPLE is every bit as interoperable as Jabber, with the added weight of the fact that AOL has agreed to interoperate with other vendors using SIMPLE once it is complete.

    1. Re:Jabber? Try SIMPLE. by chefmonkey · · Score: 3, Informative
      As far as SIMPLE goes, well, Jabber actually exists. That's a plus, isn't it?

      SIMPLE exists in a firm enough form that it's shipping in the MSN Messenger that comes with Windows XP (and can be downloaded for other MS platforms), and has received the explicit backing of both Microsoft and AOL.

      So, let's review -- a SIMPLE client is already installed on every XP system in the world, and AIM will soon provide interoperability using SIMPLE.

      Those are plusses, aren't they?

    2. Re:Jabber? Try SIMPLE. by infiniti99 · · Score: 5, Informative

      It was not designed for security (for example, it sends passwords as clear text)

      What?!?! Jabber sends the password as a hash and even has SSL support. Some clients do PGP end-to-end if you really that. Not to mention that the server-to-server protocol does "dialback" to prevent spoofing. Sorry, but you are terribly misinformed here. Jabber is the most secure of all IM systems (which unfortunately doesn't say much, since security is basically non-existent in ICQ, AIM, etc).

      the model it uses is inherently vulnerable to DOS attacks

      I'm not a server developer, so I'd like to hear about these DoS attack vulnerabilities (that aren't inherent to servers in general). Otherwise, I'll write this comment off as unfounded.

      you'll never convince AOL to use it.

      I'll give you this, at least. Fortunately, as an open project, Jabber will live on no matter what any company says or does. Unfortunately, without serious corporate backing, Jabber is likely to stay within the techie circle (like Linux).

      According to Peter Saint-Andre (member of the Jabber Software Foundation, who was at this year's IETF meeting), SIMPLE is about two years away from defining the protocols, let alone implementations, for a full-featured IM system. Jabber only recently had an RFC written (earlier this year), as the focus before that has been on implementations. The difference is obvious: people are using Jabber right now, while SIMPLE is basically all talk.

    3. Re:Jabber? Try SIMPLE. by chefmonkey · · Score: 3, Informative
      I'm sorry I didn't completely go into this exploit in my parenthetical phrase. I'll explain more specifically.

      The way Jabber is defined, it is subject to man-in-the-middle bid-down attacks. In particular, the fact that the Jabber "standard" specifies: "Typically a server is only going to support one of the three, a client should choose the most secure by default," anyone able to intercept messages can pare down the server's capability list to plain text, thus forcing the client to expose a plain-text password.

      Further, because the security used is the weakest supported by either the client or the server, typical deployments still see a large number of passwords sent in the clear (put a sniffer on a segment near a Jabber server and you can verify this for yourself).

      Jabber won't be free from this flaw until it deprecates plain-text passwords -- which will unfortunatly break backwards compatibilty. In short, this really is a major flaw that will be difficult for Jabber to recover from.

    4. Re:Jabber? Try SIMPLE. by jaclu · · Score: 2, Informative

      sorry to correct you, but in the server, you define what access methods to accept in the
      load main="jsm" section. If you want to be secure just disallow mod_auth_plain

      Most sites dont to this today, since not all clients support ssl, but if you want to have a secure server you should not allow plain auth, and just tell users to change clients

    5. Re:Jabber? Try SIMPLE. by Temas · · Score: 3, Informative

      While this may be true of a completely base installation, it is not true on a server that has been configured well. If karma (socket reading limitter) is used properly with a short auth time then the server will have no problems. Besides, this is not a protocol issue at all, rather an implementation one.

  15. Re:It'll never happen with the big guys by plague3106 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Not true. AOL had IMs way before they had AIM. But at that time, the only way to IM would be to have AOL. AIM just lets you get to the IM feature of aol without having aol.

  16. Re:AOL's proposal by chefmonkey · · Score: 4, Informative

    AOL has abandoned support for the initiative you site (about two years ago, in fact). They are now throwing their support (along with Microsoft) behind an IETF emerging standard called SIPMLE. See this article for confirmation of AOL's support of SIMPLE.

  17. Gaim by L.Schierer · · Score: 2, Informative

    Gaim supports AIM, ICQ, Y!, MSN, Jabber, IRC, Gadu-Gadu, Zepher, and Napster (though why you would want to use napster via an opennap server just to talk is beyond me). As such, supporting 7 protocols, it suprasses Trillian as an all-in-one messanger (besides the fact it vastly pre-dates trillian), and is open source to boot. Its amazing that gaim's only mentioned a handfull of times while trillian is in almost every other post it seems.

  18. Re:AOL's proposal by slamb · · Score: 3, Informative
    All you need to send an IM from one service to another is the username and domain, which would look like an e-mail address and might actually be an e-mail address.

    Jabber addresses are like that.

    When you send e-mail from one address to another, you send the message to your (ISP's) SMTP server, which looks up the domain name you're sending the message to, gets the SMTP server defined in the MX (mail exchange) record for the domain, and sends the message there. Under this proposal, a new record type would be added to DNS, an IMX record that specifies which server can handle IM connections.

    This is how the Jabber transport works as well. Except that instead of creating a new DNS RR, they used SRV records. SRV records are a generalization of this concept. They are beginning to be used for LDAP, Kerberos, Jabber, etc. (Try "host -t srv _ldap._tcp.uiowa.edu", for example.)

    That's really the only way to go. I will never be happy with instant messaging until it is decentralized like email. Providing a way of looking up the correct server with the address and the existing infrastructure (DNS) is the only way to go.

  19. Re:ICQ by emir · · Score: 2, Informative

    on windows, trillian is okay too. it can handle irc, aim, icq and msn. its free too (not as speech through). it even supports encrypted communication.

    check it out www.trillian.cc

    --
    -- http://electronicintifada.net --
  20. Trillian by CathedralRulz · · Score: 2, Informative

    Whoever wrote this article is way behind the curve. Fancy little free and advert free program called Trillian works great for me - tying Yahoo, MSN, AOL, ICQ and even IRC into one neat little app. http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/

  21. SMTP has been around much longer. by GekkePrutser · · Score: 2, Informative
    Interoperable email was solved by having each of the big boys (like Prodigy, Compuserve, and AOL) to agree on a standard.

    As far as I know, SMTP was around before Compuserve, AOL etc. ever existed. It's not like they agreed on building it as a standard, it was already there. With so many people using it that they couldn't force their own proprietary protocols down everyone's throat.

    There's not such a standard that predates all existing IM's, so I think it will be a bigger struggle to get to a standard this time.

    --GekkePrutser