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AIM And ICQ to be Integrated
sam writes "According to this InfoWorld article
the next version of America Online's Instant Messenger will allow users to communicate with ICQ users in a move that will bridge the gap between the company's two popular chat services.
Maybe AOL finally woke up and realized people were using IM clients that have both in them." I still use only IRC for messaging, but this is gonna make things easier for a lot of users.
For all practical purposes, aren't they integrated on the client side?
Does this mean they'll be adding ICQ functionality to AIM, such as being able to message/recieve messages while i'm not online or the person i'm sending to isn't online?
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
This HAS to be meant to be either a hge troll or a humorous comment, but since it hasn't been modded as such, here are the inaccuracies in this comment:
1- UNIX talk predates ICQ by at least 10 years, and it appears as "vastly inferior" because it's meant for a completely different purpose. A car appears "vastly inferior" to an airplane because it can't fly, but that's not what it was meant to do.
2- Trillian's author (and those of all the "compatible" IM utilities) aren't "stealing intellectual property"; they're doing reverse engineering of the protocols, then implementing those protocols in their own applications. It's actually so legal, it's even explicitly permitted by law. It's actually a good idea since that way I can use all those IM networks without having to use Windows, or Yahoo's, AOL's and Microsoft's client software. Um, maybe they would prefer I didn't use their IM networks?
Trading files is not "illegal" per se. That's all I'm going to say about this one.
This is AOL realizing "hey, we bought ICQ a while ago, let's start actually doing something with it", because they were getting stomped in the IM arena by competitors.
AIM and ICQ are both owned by AOL. ICQ is the original IM.
Accurate.
And at one point was the most poular.
I think this is accurate, but i'm not sure.
There have occasionally been UNIX knockoffs, like the vastly inferior command line "talk" implementation, however it was incapable of letting you know whne new users had signed on, also, it could not do file transfers.
Um, wrong. If the parent post is a troll, this is probably the little "subtle absurdity" flag. The UNIX Talk protocol is very, very old and serves a different purpose than that of AIM. I'm not sure when it dates from, but i see here an RFC for a message-sending protocol to allow "write" messages to be sent across TCP/IP, that dates all the way back to 1983. For comparison, AOL was founded in 1985. Anyway, Talk has not traditionally been used quite the same way as AIM, for that purpose look at IRC. (Yes, it's slightly different.)
Programs like Trillian, that do what the author of this article suggests have been having a difficult time lately because they steal Yahoo, AOL, and Microsofts intellectual property, in an attempt to make money. It's like companies like Kazaa and Gnucleus that make money off of other people trading files. It's illegal. And not a good idea.
This is absolute nonsense. Trillian, GAIM, etc have been having no problems, as they are using AOL's servers with permission using the specifically-made-for-third-parties TOC protocol. The big sound fury about "stealing" was when MSN tried to use the OSCAR protocol used by AOL's AIM client instead of TOC, and AOL said "you can't do that, these are our servers and you have to agree to use TOC". This was a very reasonable issue, but the issue was over "unauthorized access and use of a computer system", not over "stealing intellectual property" (?? Where does intellectual property come into this? TOC is publicly documented, and when third-party AIM clients do some wierd runaround and try to slip in some OSCAR features, they do so using reverse-engineering, which is completely legal to the point of not even being an intellectual property issue). Anyway, Jabber has problems from time to time because AOL really, really seems to hate them, and so last i checked they are leaving TOC out of the main codebase for fear that jabber puts TOC support in, AOL will shut down TOC just to keep jabber out or something.
This is just AOL doing what is best. They saw a duplication of effort in their own company and decided to stop it.
Accurate.
I would bet that a lot more people would use Linux if Open Source programmers would wake up and realize that they also are (most of the time) duplicating effort. Gnome and KDE are but one example. Just search freshmeat for an mp3 database organizer one day, and you'll see what I mean.
This is opinion. However, it is by no means an invalid one.
AOL/Time Warner is bringing together the two massive IM communities to disuade them from straying onto other integrated IM solutions, like Trillian (which has probably been mentioned about 50 times in this discussion by now). This maximizes their advertisement potential. Users will predictably be weined off of ICQ towards AIM, which will eliminate the need to develop two seperate IM clients that effectively accomplish the same goal.
AFAIK Miranda does ICQ, AIM, MSN. I don't really care, though, I only need a slim ICQ client. Most clients I tried were either too slim - they couldn't do things like file transfers - or too ICQish fat - Trillian takes just as long to load as ICQ did. Also, no IM I tried was able to recover my ICQ history along with the contact list.[1]
Well, Miranda could do that, and it also starts in, oh, a split second as opposed to a split minute, which is quite comfortable. FWIW, Miranda is also free as in speech, not as in beer.
The fact that other clients support more protocols certainly doesn't necessarily mean they're better. As discussed above, many people seem to think Gaim, while supporting even more protocols than Trillian, isn't exactly the most comfortable IM around. Well, I'm as comfortable with Miranda as I've never been with any IM before.
[1] I'm pretty sure other alternative IMs can do that by now, too - but none did when I tried them. My IM history is quite important to me.
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