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Will Instant Messaging Ever Unite?
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?"
what will it take to unite all these individual IM networks under one umbrella?
jabber.org
Trillian rocks... combines 3 or 4 different IM into a single, skinnable interface, and even manages to keep up with AOL's shennanigans...
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.
- 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.
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Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
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.
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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).
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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.
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.
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.
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.