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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."
every 4 years over 250 Million taxpayers get together to beg the government to work as a team and look how far that's gotten!
I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause. --Dostoevsky
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.
Oops!
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.
Works fine for me.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
The non-Pro version of Trillian is and continues to stay free. I am right now on four IRC channels and (gulp) MSN Messenger through Trillian.
I will pay for Trillian if and when there is a Trillian for Linux.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
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 ?
Yeah, I read that paper... A co-worker of mine IM'ed it to me today.
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).
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?
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).
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.
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
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.
--
Evan (no reference)
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
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.
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?