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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."
External FINANCIAL influence always makes a difference.
It's not going to happen. AOL, MS, etc, agreeing on what would have to be an open standard?
*laugh*
Unless your employees are simply wasting time, companies using IM software should have procedures and regulations for it. IE - forcing them to use one certain client. Problem solved, eh?
I am using Gaim, and I have connections going to IRC, AOL, MSN, Yahoo, and ICQ. All work great, plus everything works as a plugin. I even have a plugin loaded the checks my out-going messages spelling. :-)
We use Jabber for a distributed (multi-state) group of developers. Perhaps I should just knuckle under and pay for long distance? (I'm sure telecom stockholders would appreciate my efforts). I think you lack an understanding of how IM is used by professional developers - we don't sit all day chatting about the weather, how 3l33t we are or throwing MP3s to each other; we get quick answers to questions that would otherwise hold up programming a module.
Additionally, I love it when people use this to communicate outside the building - rather that than the Cell going off during a meeting because the wife needs some fixings for dinner on the way home.
The reality is it depends on the maturity of your team. All of my team members are mature enough to use IM as a tool. Those who were not mature enough were fired after a warning. This applies to ANY communication tool, any violation of company codes.
Sig under construction since 1998.
"There has to be a business model where Microsoft and Yahoo and AOL get paid,"
I disagree. There doesn't have to be and there shouldn't be. The article mentions that IM should be like E-Mail. Well, Microsoft and Yahoo don't get paid just because some guy using a yahoo e-mail account e-mails someone using a hotmail account.
My advice to these "finanical" guys seeking standards - ignore it. The problem will solve itself in a matter of time. IM is too big of a thing to be contained within proprietary networks. As these all in one messenger programs like Trillian become the de-facto standard, companies like Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo will have to give up their futile efforts of hording all their IM customers to themselves. Or better yet, if (when?) Jabber becomes the real standard, the corporations wont even have to worry about Microsoft or AOL anymore.
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.
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?
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
How does trillian combine the different IM services? is it like gaim which supports them all on the client side, or Jabber which tries to provide connections to other IM servers from the Jabber server?
Whatever happened to the aim-t probelms?
:) It is a darn shame Trillian doesn't support Jabber, otherwise I'd actually recommend the program. My advice to you is to use a Jabber client alongside Trillian. Yeah I know, using two clients sucks, but you were probably doing this before Trillian came around anyway. Start building your Jabber roster now. You're gonna have to do it eventually anyway, and starting early will speed up adoption.
AFAIK, aim-t isn't even an option at the jabber.com / jabber.org servers. There's not really anything that can be done to prevent an IP address ban. From what I understand, these are explicit bans against the major Jabber servers, and are not necessarily related to the amount of AIM logins.
Coming from AIM as my primary chat medium, that was ahuge hurdle to adopting Jabber personally.
Depending on how you feel about open standards (and I hope a lot of us feel strongly towards them here), I encourage you to put in a little bit more effort
I recommend this especially to Trillian users like you, who probably have other Trillian-using friends that could all easily begin using Jabber. I agree it is tougher to convert your AIM-using Grandma to Jabber, but you Trillian users are natural rebels, right? Rebel! And keep Trillian around for talking to Grandma.
Personally, I used to use ICQ for a long time, then I began using Jabber and the ICQ transport. Later, I decided to start using AIM and MSN transports also (I figured, hey, why not?). Bad move.. this brought me knee deep in proprietary IM. I strongly suggest NOT using IM services that you weren't already using. Ie, if you start using Trillian or Jabber, do the world a favor and please don't just start using every single service. This only promotes them.
So one day I decided to bite the bullet and unregistered from ALL the transports I was using. Now I use Jabber only. It was tough in the beginning (well, a lot less people bothered me on IM, hehe), but eventually I rebuilt my contact list. All my friends use Jabber now and so does my family. Right now I've got over 100 Jabber contacts, although I can't say I talk to a lot of them. I don't recommend this route for everyone, but it sure feels good to be free of AOL once and for all (and there was much rejoicing).
-Justin
The reality is it depends on the maturity of your team. All of my team members are mature enough to use IM as a tool. Those who were not mature enough were fired after a warning. This applies to ANY communication tool, any violation of company codes.
Any company that fires based upon the use of a communication tool deserves what will ultimately become of it, which is failure (apart from the criminal or sexually harrasing, of course). If someone is producing good quality whatever in good quantities, then it should be absolutely irrelevant if they are playing computer chess while chatting with their buddies about D&D. If, on the other hand, someone isn't producing, then it shouldn't matter that they put in 60 hour weeks (as is usually the case with non-producers: Martyrdom through incompetence), and that they sit starting hardcore at code from 8am until 6pm every day, they should be moved to a different job, or ultimately fired.
The way I manage is entirely output based, and no amount of ass kissing or excuse making can make me ignore a lack of contribution to the project, but on the flip side I don't care if someone works 12 hours a week and has slashdot on auto-reload: If the output is there, then how can they be faulted? Too many people bring a factory line mentality to software development, and unfortunately such a mentality is often based on envy: You have to keep everyone beaten down to the same level to ensure that the lowly doesn't feel green with envy.
Like so much we read today, this is really about control. The financial institutions have large investments in AOL/Time-Warner, Microsoft, and Yahoo. They would like nothing more than for an elite club to control and profit from instant messaging. They know that if something isn't done quick, Jabber will take over as the de facto standard and eliminate the profit opportunity.
It looks to me like they are trying to form an organization, similar to the DVD-CCA, which would dictate payment and conduct requirements amongst member companies. The organization (let's call it Chatter) would form an artificial barrier to entry for startup vendors. If you want to enter the instant messaging market, you will have to pay a modest fee ($100,000) to read the protocol specifications, and agree to pay an annual fee to communicate with the other vendors.
Each member of Chatter would maintain their own servers. If you want your servers to communicate with other Chatter members, you have to become a member yourself. It does not matter if you're running a Jabber server, AIM server, or some other instant messaging server. If you want to communicate with the vast majority of IM users, you have to join Chatter.
In the end, almost all instant messages will be filtered through a few small companies. In order to pay for the artificial costs (and of course generate extra revenue), vendors will force advertisements upon their customers, track who people communicate with, and otherwise turn all aspects of life into a commercial venture. Who knows, maybe they'll also archive conversations for law enforcement.
What needs to be done, is for someone to smack them hard with an anti-trust suit. Of course, we all know that will never happen. If people would just switch to Jabber (before the formation of an organization like Chatter), this would all become a non-issue.
1. the messages
It's not about just messaging "wassup" and other time-wasters back and forth to people. It's often two traders on different sides of the floor communicating prices back and forth, being able to IM clients from some research tool, broadcasting large market events/news to everyone at once, tech support getting IMed when systems start going through the death throes (followed by pages, etc). It might be getting IM'd and having the message go to a pager if you're away from your desk, or to email if your pager is down.
2. productivity
Working on multinational teams, or in different buildings, or using chatrooms to say stuff like "I'm taking down the test system" when you don't want to disrupt the guy next to you (and let 10 other developers descretely know what the story is) enhance productivity. Sure, there may be some bullshit floating around on IM, as well, but investment bank IT people are pretty industrious as a whole (at least from what I've seen), and a good number of employees over the entire firm take desk lunches -- implying they'll stay on task pretty well.
3. logging/external service providers
A big advantage to running an IM through your firm is that you can log everything (good for SEC, etc). I sincerely doubt that the banks are looking at having all of their internal stuff go through MSN/external or AOL/external. Anything that happens is going to be kept local unless it HAS to go outside.
4. The current mess
My company runs an proprietary chat server, jabber, sametime, and some yahoo gateway, and probably more crap that I don't know about. It'd be BRILLIANT if everybody (including clients) could standardize on one message format -- it could save all of us loads of trouble.
5. jabber
As good as jabber is in theory, the open source server components used to be pretty rough (last fall). The commercial stuff might be nice, but I remember spending loads of time hacking at the XDB/XML database and thinking "Damn, this is really not flexible for enterprise-level usage" (i.e. 20-80,000 users, multiple continents/offices/divisions). It would be nice if everyone standardized on it and everything was made bank-reliable (a system going down can literally mean millions of dollars lost). Maybe all the banks should devote a few good programmers each to fixing it up, or donate a mil to the jabber foundation or something.
Just a few random points (I'm in a hurry)
there is no thing
what else could you want?
Why on earth would financial companies ask IM companies to cooperate? Are they suddenly finding their brokers and back-room deal makers suddenly IMing all the time? Wouldn't they have banned such behavior from their intranets and extranets?
Sounds to me like they want to make the IM companies easier to acquire. (How you can build a company on something as nebulous as IMing is beyond me.)
-- haaz.