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?"

Comments

Re:and the answer is...

[SquadBoy]

You beat me to it. Yes jabber is *the* future. And since it can do SSL and the server can be kept internal I can even fit it in under my security policy whereas other IM systems would be a big old no go. :)

There is a standard IM protocol

[jedie]

It's called IRC ;)

I know enough people who use IM clients because it's easier to use than IRC clients.
Perhaps a cheesy, modified (read: VERY easy to use IRC client, with smilies, "send" buttons AND an option "start up when windows is booting" ;)) would solve the problem for everyone.
Hell, if you take a good look at IM systems, they aren't that different from IRC anyway, they are just really limited and leave out most of the advanced options.
ofcourse, on the other hand, I would like to see an IRC network capable of handling the millions of IM users. (imagine trying to explain to a user that he can't message to his friend because there is a netsplit)

You know what, skip that thought, IRC is already filled with nitwit morons, we don't need another 10 million of them spamming the networks :p

Why do we even need instant messaging?

[Ark42]

Is there anything really useful that any instant messanger does that could NOT be done via a tray-application communication over IRC? You can still have messages pop up or be displayed in various styles. You can still have some sort of encryption over IRC if you wanted to Im sure. Transfer files? sure, thats what DCC is for. ICQ supports sending messages when the user if offline, but it hardly works since they might not gett the message for days. Most other IMs require the user to be online. I look at something like Trillian, with IRC support built in, and wonder what is great and new about the ICQ/Y!/MSM/AIM protocols? Do they really let you do anything different?

CenterICQ

[dmarien]

CenterICQ is a text based console app which uses ncurses, and color themes.

It supports AIM, Yahoo! ICQ, MSN Messenger, and IRC.

cICQ has the best interface of any console app I have ever used, and the developer Konst, reponds to almost anything posting to the mailing list... I myself have had almost a dozen of the features I requested added to the program.

The program is completely stable, supports chat mode for all protocols, full history, ignore lists, contact groups, non IM contacts, collapsable groups, hide offline users, etc.... honestly -- this program has almost every worth while feature I've ever seen in any IM client -- not to mention that it supports every single protocol seamlessly, so the user (unless he/she organized contacts into groups based on protocol, wouldn't even know what protocol their contacts were using...Mbr>
whatever, enough rambling... download this program, and support Konst's development!

download link

Re:Answer: the end of the world.

[newt_sd]

Ummm its nice this person has so much insight into microsofts business plan. I bet lots of corporations would pay big bucks to know MSFT's strategy before everyone else. "Leveraging their instant message monopoly to gain market dominance????" Someone's got their head up there ass. I realize all that msft has done in the past but to assume you know their next move like this guy is crazy. Business 101 tells you that the market changes fast enough that aside from a few indicators you larger are unsure about any future business plans. Nice work buddy.

AOL's proposal

[Phroggy]

AOL's proposed solution, which was submitted to the IETF. Nobody, including AOL, really takes it seriously. I'm not entirely sure why.

Basically, the concept is this: anyone - AOL or Microsoft or Yahoo or Joe Blow down the street - can run their own IM service. Every IM user has a username/screen name, and every IM service has a domain name (aol.com, hotmail.com, yahoo.com, joeblow.net). 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.

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.

So, say you're on Yahoo Messenger. You want to send an IM to another Yahoo user, Yahoo takes care of that and it's nobody else's business. You want to send an IM to an AOL user, you send it to Yahoo's servers, Yahoo lookup aol.com and contacts the server defined in the IMX record. For security AOL looks up the IMX record for yahoo.com too, and they do a three-way handshake. The message is sent, and it appears to the AOL user like an IM that came from joebob@yahoo.com.

Of course for redundancy and load balancing there can be multiple IMX records, just like there can be multiple MX records for e-mail. It's been awhile since I read the proposal; there's more to it than that. It may not be perfect, but it would have been an open standard that anyone could use, not limited to just the big companies.

Re:Answer: the end of the world.

[BlueFashoo]

"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."

From the Trillian homepage: Microsoft was kind enough to alert us to a change in the MSN servers that would have negatively affected Trillian. Thanks, Microsoft! "

Microsoft seems to be playing nice, maybe because they don't have the monopoly on IM and don't see themselves getting it anytime soon. Maybe because of the PR value. "Hey we didn't squelch tiny little Trillian." Whatever their motives, it is still good to see Microsoft playing nice for once. And it goes against your argument.

Re:Jabber? Try SIMPLE.

[chefmonkey]

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.

Okay, in this respect, I'm afraid you (and Peter) are sorely misinformed. Jabber has had its first internet-draft written about it (first internet-draft to RFC usually takes about three years), while SIMPLE is rapidly approaching RFC status (I'd be surprised if it is not published as a full-fledged RFC by year's end). It's stable enough that the most recent versions of Microsoft Messenger have included SIMPLE support.

While you don't seem to personally care about widespread support, the endorsement of an open standard (which SIMPLE is) by such IM giants as AOL and Microsoft certainly seems to give it a certain amount of credibility.

SIMPLE has a client on every Windows XP box in the world, and will soon be joined by every AIM client in the world. What's Jabber's total penetration?