Financial Companies Ask IM Companies To Work Together

sammy.lost-angel.com writes "From this CNET article: "Two weeks ago, six top financial institutions met privately with AOL Time Warner, Microsoft, IBM and other leading corporate instant messaging providers and urged them to build communications networks that interoperate." The article even talks about Jabber."

Comments

Trillian

[elite lamer]

Trillian - Who cares if they work together? Trillian's still damn good, and despite threats of legal action, works with all the major IM networks (besides Jabber). It even has a quite nice IRC client.

Re:I wrote a paper about IMs in the work place...

[Trinition]

how many users have communicated with people outside of work

And that is counter-productive? I have a close circle of personal friends who are all programming gurus. I consult with them about work problems all the time. And, I also BS with them.

Take away one and you take away the other. My gains in productivity from talking with them will be gone along with the time I waste communicating with them for recreation (or, maybe I'd just resort to e-mail or telephone calls instead).

Re:Here's your problem...

[slamb]

Yeah, just like they get paid for hosting all of our web pages, email, and ft.... Wait a second, we run our own servers for those things! Why the heck can't we have an IM system that's the same way? Run our own darned IM gateways/server, and just include it as part of your address (whoops - screen name, can't have anything technical sounding). User@server has worked well enough for email, heck with an LDAP3 directory backing it, email your address could easily be mapped to the IM presence on your server/gateway. If you really wanted to get fancy, add an IM record type to DNS.

You've just described Jabber. Anyone can run a server. It uses user@server email-style addresses. Servers communicate between themselves as in email; this can be turned off for Intranet usage. It uses SRV DNS RRs which are a generalization of email's MX RRs. I think LDAP integration in the existing servers is poor so far, but that's an implementation detail and can be improved later.

Thinking like this is just plain stupid - there's no possible reason why this couldn't work without relying on MS/AOL/Yahoo to run our servers for us... Except they beat us to it. So how do we convince those planning to spend $$ to do it in a responsible fashion?

Jabber is being pushed toward standardization in the IETF, as the article mentioned. I think the situation will improve greatly after the IETF working group for it is created.

Re:Gaim!

[JabberWokky]

Kopete is the new standard IM framework for KDE 3.1 (due out end of Octoberish), and supports AIM, ICQ, IRC, Jabber, and theoretically Yahoo. I say theoretically, because I'm running the prerelease right now, and while everything works fine (there are a few missing features - gaim *is* better), Yahoo support is looking like it won't be in 3.1. Of course, they are all plugins, so they can be updated individually.

I'd say go with Gaim right now (I don't, but then I like filing bug reports for KDE :) ), and check out Kopete in a few months.

Incidently, Jabber is a protocol, yes, but most servers have gateways to AIM, Yahoo, etc. They work fine - I was using Psi through charente.de (I probably have that server name name wrong), and would talk to all of my AIM, Yahoo and ICQ using friends. Again, Gaim still has the best support for all the features of the various protocols.

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Evan (no reference)