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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
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 rocks... combines 3 or 4 different IM into a single, skinnable interface, and even manages to keep up with AOL's shennanigans...
My choice would be Trillian
668: Neighbour of the Beast
- 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.what will it take to unite all these individual IM networks under one umbrella?
Microsoft buying AOLTW ?
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
I look to Jabber as the foundation of sensible IM-ing; users are screenname@jabber.server.address, and messaging users on multiple "services" is just a matter of adding them to your buddy list. No funky add-ons or protocol descriptors needed. Only problem is, Jabber isn't useful as a revenue generator. But what if IM-ing simply became a standard ISP feature? If each ISP ran a Jabber-type server, you'd just need someone's email address to reach him.
Since IM-ing is obviously becoming as widely used as email, why isn't it a part of the standard service package? If distributed, like Jabber, I can't see it placing a huge burden on even very small ISPs.
Email is pretty much standardized on one app, and look how great that's been!
Seriously, we recognize the dangers of monoculture in other areas of computing -- OS, email client, etc. -- what makes people think that IM is going to be any better? I'd think the last thing we'd want in computing is another monoculture.
I know the question is not when will IM be ruled by a single client but rather when will IM clients be interoperable, but is there really any chance of it happening another way? These are big corporations! These are the same people who keep us perpetually 3-5 years behind the rest of the world on cellphone technology!
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
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"?
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
dmarien
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
Quote:
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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).
=== 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.
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.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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.
Standardising on a standard would be a Good thing, and I don't think it would result in less choice. What it would mean is that you could choose your service provider and client by the quality of their services and features, rather than by the amount of your friends that are on that service - just like email. It's a royal pain in the ass having to have three different clients on my machine at once, or go to a multi-system program that invariably breaks whenever the protocol on one of them is changed....
Imagine a world where you could only talk on email to other people on that email system!
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