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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?"
The problem is that AOL made instant messaging as we know it today. They feel they are the "inventors" and hence shouldn't have to let anyone else in on their network. If they had opened things up from the get go, they would now be the absolute standard for instant messaging instead of the de facto one for 90%+ of the people I know. Their stubbornness is what caused it.
Trillian is only a temporary answer. Jabber could've been a better piece of the answer, but it got de-railed as far as IM interoperability. We truly need interoperable protocols. Or better yet, a standard protocol.
The road block to such a protocol, however, is AIM, and possibly the other IM providers. How do you get people to switch from one established, large IM provider such as AOL to a new protocol/provider? If you don't have interoperability (which AOL has demonstrate its resistance to in the past), you won't get people to switch.
It seems to me that the ideal solution would be for everyone to agree on a single protocol. This will not happen. You see, it used to be that someone would come out with a protocol and client and server implementations, and would release them into the wild. Then, people would either use it (like IRC) or not (like UNIX's talk command). If they did, then other and better implementations would come out, as long as the protocol was solid. This is how email, FTP, HTTP and many other common Internet protocols were developed.
Now, though, companies create the protocols and allow them only to the chosen few who use their software (think AOL for IM and Real for streaming content). The protocol is not generally available, meaning better clients can't be made, and there is often a dependence upon resources wholly owned by a single company. Sometimes (again AOL and Real come to mind) these are genuinely useful. In that case, someone (another company, generally) will produce a competing product, that does the same thing in a different way.
Some people will choose one method and some will choose another. Users cannot force standardization. The corporate developers are being paid to enforce balkanization, rather than to work towards standardization. Independent developers cannot get enough of a critical mass to make it feasible for users to migrate to their systems, or for corporations to adopt the independent methods as a matter of convenience.
The net result, no pun intended, is that there is no way to move to a standard. This leaves us with the options of using a client which speaks all of the different protocols, choosing to pocket ourselves into a small part of the possible Internet community (with corresponding obeisance to the local corporate power), or choosing to cover our screen with all of the various blessed programs. Only a unified client holds any real appeal to me, and that is fraught with problems. For example, try talking to AIM when AOL keeps changing the way the servers work on the back end! It's a nontrivial problem.
So I guess the point I'm trying to make is that expecting a unified IM system to appear, just because it makes sense from a user perspective, is not very likely to be worth anyone's while.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Why do we need a standard IM protocol? The same reason we needed a standard email protocol. Interoperable email was solved by having each of the big boys (like Prodigy, Compuserve, and AOL) to agree on a standard. The answer was _not_ to use some all-in-one Prodigy+Compuserver+AOL mail application.
:)
There are other problems with the Trillian approach. First, it is a "single-vendor-solution", which is not what you want with something as important as IM. Imagine if the only email client you could ever use was Outlook. What do you do about Linux? What about PDAs? Wait for Cerulean to develop clients for every situation? Not. The whole point of an open protocol is to allow anyone to develop a interoperable server or client.
Second, AOL (and Yahoo also, based on rumors) are not happy with these 3rd-party interoperability attempts. What happens when AOL decides to detect Trillian, and not allow it to use their network? Please, we don't need this kind of childish BS in instant messaging, especially as it becomes more prevalent in the corporate world.
My personal jabber server keeps on ticking no matter what AOL does. This is how IM should have been since the beginning.
IM interoperability is a serious problem. I'll agree with you that Trillian solves the problem, however in my opinion it is in a temporary way. The real solution is to standardize on a protocol. Here's to hoping Jabber takes over the world