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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."
wouldn't it be great if there was also an API? then there could be display clients on your machine, and you could interact with your online buddies as if, say, you were at a bar, e.g. Neal Stephenson's Metaverse. How cool is that.
and we use Jabber in house like mad to bridge all the other protocols. With Jabber I can ICQ, AIM, Yahoo all acrossed a validated http proxy. In house we also use Lotus Sametime, which IMHO SUCKS horribly compared to any of the other clients.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Run a little sample survey, and see how many users have communicated with people outside of work, at least once using the IM. Chances are you will find all but one or two have.
They are also another vector for virus infection, unless you configure your firewall properly.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Man, what happened to 'talk'. I use this with my machines all of the time, and I can do 'talk joeblow@machine' very simply and its been around forever.
Hell, even windows has the popup messaging protocol that's been around since at least WFWG, and I can still talk to windows boxes using Kopete today!
The problem is that IM is now a widely used application of the Internet, and thus should be interoperable. The existence of programs like Trillian (and its millions of downloads) shows there is no question that the public wants interoperable IM. You may not think IM needs to be interoperable, but the rest of us certainly do.
The reason the government stepped in on AOL is because they are so dominant. It is MUCH harder to enforce a standard this late in the IM game. Back in the early days of the public Internet, many services had incompatible/closed email systems (Prodigy, AOL, Compuserve, etc). Eventually they wised up and all agreed to use SMTP, but this was probably only because SMTP was already an established standard. It is much harder to wedge Jabber in as a standard today, when you've got millions already using the closed systems.
I should add here that, for example, AOL does not offer POP3. They still use a proprietary email client. In much the same way, they can continue to use Oscar (the AIM protocol) internally for their users (and have all sorts of internal "value-added-competition-healthy" services), but they really ought to talk Jabber to the rest of the world.
Anyhow, there's not much to debate here. Jabber is going to be accepted by the IETF soon, so finally we'll have an official standard. However, only time will tell if the big boys of IM will start using it...
Summary:
They are not good work tools, if you want to keep productivity high.
Absurd. I'm a software developer, and like most software developers I'm an introvert. As such I have a desire to use forms of communications like email or instant messaging wherever possible, so I don't proclaim to speak for anyone and everyone, but rather for my "type": I would say, without the slightest ounce of doubt, that instant messaging (and its close cousin email) have been incredibly productive in the workplace. Why? While the reasons are several, the primary reasons are that they are instantaneous to send (no looking up a phone number, dialing, waiting for ringing...waiting...waiting for voicemail menu...talking for 35 seconds...hitting pound...1....2), they are asynchronous (they don't demand the time of the other person instantly, but rather effectively install queues in your workplace so that people can work most efficiently at given tasks. Of course every workplace has the work avoiding blamecaster who'll always be spinning his wheels idle, protesting to all who'll listen that he's "waiting on so and so". Such people should be fired immediately), and you can get to the root of the matter far quicker than you can using alternate methods of communication. I won't bother exploring any of these because they should be self evident.
Having said that, I have met some very firm resistant from "old schoolers", and alternately people who I would best describe as "bullshitters": I worked with one gentlemen (to loosely use that term) once who was a unbelievable pathological liar- He would spin such a web of bullshit that it was just baffling. However, I noticed that he would never reply to an email, or send an IM, or even leave a voicemail for that matter: It always had to be a "quick meeting". Social hackers love the control that physical or voice meetings allow them as well (a control that is lost in asynchronous messaging).
Ok, I'll start off by saying I am not familiar with Jabber, so please do not flame me if it does what I am about to describe - which is "Peer to peer IM services."
Not client P2P, but server P2P. Follow the SMTP/IRC model. Anyone, ISP, company, whomever, can set up an IM server, just like they currently set up email servers (hell, you can probably combine the two.) Your IM name is similar to email address user@server. The client logs in to their IM server (user1@server1). When they try to lookup another user (user2@server2), the server opens a connection to server2.
If done right, all connections should be SSL encypted. And no more than 2 servers involved in any conversation. Like SMTP, the client uses standard protocol to talk to server and can log into any server he has an account with. The servers talk to each other and can negotiate common set of features (again like SMTP).
Like SMTP, this model is pretty scalable, and independant of a central server/service. But unlike SMTP, it can be build to be near real time and reliable and without large legacy overhead associated with email.
Unlike IRC, there is no need to keep a large number of servers always in sync for every message. A lifespan of the message is between client1 - server1 -server2 - client2.
The protocol is open so anyone can run their own server, their own client, etc. Large company like AOL/Yahoo/etc. can sell/give away their own accounts (like email accounts now) but any ISP can easily throw in this as service. No matter who your provicer is, you can communicate with anyone.
For a large company, like the financial companies mentions, it would be easy to run an internal server that can have secure connections with their partners - one that never even has to leave private networks - like internal email or in the olden days Lotus Notes peering modem networks (anyone still remember those?) . The security implications of this alone are worth the trouble for them. And if they are concerned with logging everything, it would be as easy as logging email if they are running their own servers (I do not like this, but I am sure it will be needed).
All in all, this is not all that different from SMTP, but SMTP is aging and has too much overhead to accomplish this. But it will be duplicating much of SMTP purpose and I can even see it replacing SMTP all together.
The two biggest problems I see is a - the big guys will not like this - the only way to shove ads down your throat is to make you use THEIR service and THEIR client - and there will be no reason to. But if it gains enough momentum, it can happen. The bigger problem I forsee is SPAM. Not sure how to keep it down without compromising the whole model.
It's my dream, what do ya think?
-Em
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
MS does not 'play nice,' they only give the appearance of doing so to distract you while easing a hand into the pocket in which your wallet resides. :-)
In an alternate universe, this is going on:
1) MSN Messenger (MSNM) interoperates with AIM.
2) MSNM is welded into XP.
3) MS says, "Hey, Windows users! Why bother to download AIM when you can just use MSNM, which is already in XP and lets you send IMs to your AIM-using friends?"
4) Lazy users, content to just use what's already there, abandon using AIM in droves because hey, they don't have to download MSNM.
5) MSNM becomes the dominant IM app.
6) AIM usage drops. AIM ad revenues sink. AIM development budget and staff is cut. AIM starts lagging behind MSNM, feature-wise. AIM becomes IM also-ran.
7) MSNM gradually adopts a new protocol that is DMCA-protectable to lock out 3rd-party clients.
8) After the new protocol is in place, one day MSNM users can suddenly no longer IM people using AIM. Microsoft PR spews forth some mumbo-jumbo about 'IM technology heading off in a different direction' as an explanation.
9) A subsequent Windows version or service pack renders AIM inoperable. AIM, long un-updated, finally has a stake driven through its heart.
10) Time to start charging for use of MSNM.
~Philly
Wasn't one of the conditions of the AOLTW megamerge that AIM must be essentially opened up, allowing competing IM programs to interoperate with it? What happened to that, or am I missing something?
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
This is part of the reason that, for years, MSFT allowed rampant pairacy the Office suite. It was not about mindshare. For every copy of Office out there, the value of the copy of Office that some business legally bought off the shelf becomes more valuable because there are more people whom they can interchange documents with. This means that it is more likely that the next person will buy a copy of Office. This is why fax machines were originally sold in pairs.
Now AOL has had a history of cutting Trillian off from AIM while MSN gives the facade of playing nice. If MSN helps trillian keep current, then they are increasing the value of the MSN messenger client, thus indirectly hurting AIM. Therefore MSFT is using AOL's moves to isolate AIM as the tools for their (AOL's) own demise. Nice.
Nope. I work Tech Support (Graveyard)for a company with offices in many countries. I have Wintel, UNIX and Network guys everywhere. And everyone is on my contact list, from the CIO (so I know if he's upstairs), to our UNIX guy in Singapore. If a call or ticket comes in, or a situation arises, I can - at a glance - at 4AM - tell who's in, and if they're actually using their PC. Instant messaging someone for whom it is a minor issue to perform some small task (restart something, whatever) certainly beats the hell out of Dialing For Dollars and waking people up who then have to boot, connect, fix it and try to get back to sleep. It also beats calling the guys overseas, who I frequently cannot understand. For some reason, these guys have perfect spelling and grammar on Trillian.