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The Business of Instant Messaging
willll writes "The Washington Post is running a story about how AOL plans to make money from Instant Messaging, one of the few successes in recent times for AOL. This article includes plans for corporate versions of AIM as well as discussion on some of the state on instant messaging."
First post and all, but....
I have successfully implemented IM at a number of large organisations here in Australia.
Microsoft decided ages ago to start charging for the service with the release of Titanium (Exchange 2003), so it's hardly news that IM can be profitable.
Good to hear other vendors are getting involved, but until AOL pull their act together in terms of marketing and security, no corporate IT department in it's right mind would deploy their stuff.
I ran a Jabber server at work until corporate provided an IM solution. They chose IBM Lotus Sametime.
Speak truth to power.
I have worked for a few companies where AIM was used by almost everyone in the company. Its alot easier to IM you're coworker who is 300 yards away about something. It comes in handy when you dont want to make a phone call or you're on the phone and you can just send an IM to get something accomplished. I remember when my friends saw me sitting on AIM at work they thought i had the best job in the world, I just saw it as part of being at work, plus it was nice to be able to chat with the outside world when you were stressed out and needed a break.
Yeah,it is, but it's true. Our company (a 150-ish person company in a tech industry) uses it pretty extesively internally... turns out half of our supply chain uses it too.
Our IT staff (read: me) threw fits about it when I first started seeing so much traffic to AOL's servers and discovered all kinds of people had been installing it. Turns out the owner and the president both have it on their personal machines and just gave everybody the go-ahead to install it, quite against my recomendations.
As much as I still despise it, I am stunned at how many people actually legitimately use it.
If it weren't being used for legit uses to communicate outside our LAN, then I could get Jabber in the door, but I can't rely on AOL not to screw with the protocols in the future. So it's either risk that, which would naturally be my fault, or endure the ad-supported AIM, security risks and all (exploitation of which would also be my fault). Grr...sorry, I'm beginning to vent...
All I really meant to say is that it really, truly is gaining popularity in legitimate business. AIM isn't just for breakfast anymore...
teeker
Productivity will come to a halt, and innovation will be stagnant for 10-15 years as a result.
Are you for real? That's quite a "doomsayer" prediction.
A corporate IM solution will have the option to limit who you can connect to (ie, no one outside the company). Those whose productivity comes to a halt, will be the same people that spends all day chatting with co-workers over other means: telephone, water cooler, whatever.
No sig
Are people willing to pay for instant messaging?
They're not aiming (sorry for the pun) this at people, they're trying to sell it to companies. Companies would probably be willing to pay for features such as chat history if a substantial amount of business communication is done over IM.
Here's what I like about it that's better than the free version:
One minor downside is that the menus in Trillian Pro don't really work with the X-Mouse feature from TweakUI. But I'd rather live without X-Mouse than Trillian Pro, oddly enough.
All in all, $25 well spent. Considering that I actively use all four major IM networks and IRC, Trillian saves me from wasting a lot of RAM, cluttering up my system tray, seeing ads in IM clients, etc. The only single-network IM client I ever use now is Yahoo, and that's only when I want to do voice chat or see someone's webcam. I never use mIRC anymore.
Note that I'm not affiliated with Cerulean in any way, I'm just a satisfied customer.
One of the beauties of Jabber, and also one that hasn't received as much attention as it should IMHO, is that is can connect to pretty much every other network out there. Granted this is a server feature, just having a Jabber client doesn't mean you get this connectivity.
.edu. Even though we have software policies (both ethical and those mandated physically on the network) we still find students installing every known IM client to man. To solve this we installed a Jabber server with transports that would allow it to connect to MSN/Yahoo/ICQ/AIM/IRC/etc.. and installed a Jabber client on each machine. Then we created policy stating that you can connect to any network you need to, but you must use the Jabber client to do so. Once students get over the hump of figuring out YAIMC, they actually enjoy being able to login once and be connected to any network with which they have an account. It also concretely gives them no excuse to install any other IM client on our machines.
FEX:
I admin at an
At home I've taken to doing the same thing. I run a local Jabber server with a full transport setup and just connect to myself with my client. It's a bit backwards, but pays off in desk space and effeciency in the end.
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.
Are people willing to pay for instant messaging?
Absolutely. We run the little-known (and unsupported) ICQ Groupware server to provide IM capabilities for our office of 60 people. Unfortunately, we're starting to push it past its capabilities, and we'd be willing to pay for a good IM server.
I've looked briefly into Jabber, but none of the documentation seems very mature, jabberd doesn't appear to provide some of the user management features we want and makes only vague references to other jabber servers that might provide different features. As much as I'd love using an open source solution for the job, I can't justify spending my (expensive) time trying to track down how to get Jabber to do what we want when we can just buy an out-of-the-box solution for cheaper.
NO CARRIER
Cryptography support.
Servers currently support SSL, and future versions will allow end-to-end encryption of the conversation itself.
Stability.
There are many different jabber clients. Some are more stable than others. Right now, I use Psi, which hasn't crashed on me once.
It should look nice and have a cool GUI.
Again, lots of different clients. I think Psi's GUI is nice. It certainly isn't as crufty as ICQ. But YMMV on this one.
It should be IM client, and nothing else.
Again, lots of clients to choose from. I don't know what kinds of features they may offer, but I'm sure there's bound to be one suited to you.
Portability.
Psi is written against QT and runs on Windows and linux. Not sure about other platforms, but I know there are Java clients out there that should run on nearly anything.
Zero tolerance policy on SPAM.
This would be up to the individual jabber server. The only thing I really got spam with is ICQ, though, which is why I don't use it. I don't get AIM spam since I stopped accepting messages from people not on my buddy list.
Support for modules.
This I'm not completely sure about. I know the SSL stuff for Psi is a drop in module. You just put the DLL (or .so if using linux) in the program's directory, and when you start back up, you have SSL available.
An open protocol specification.
The jabber protocol is completely open and 100% free. Anyone who wants is able to not only write their own client, but also their own server. Anyone can download the reference server code and run their own, too. It's very nice.
A real revenue model, not based on ads or spyware.
How about just free?
A shiny retail box.
Can't help ya there.
Jabber apparently stacks up pretty well. :)
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
Comment removed based on user account deletion
http://www.endeavors.com ....has secure instant msesaging/collaboration tools
I was mostly thinking this would be useful in the case where developers collaborate from different geographic locations, the most common case being open source. When I'm in the office I'll holler down the hall or go ask a Human (tm), but in cases where coworkers are working at home or in the world of open source I could definitely see this feature being useful.
Just my opinion tho.
I do agree with your last paragraph tho.
Do it for da shorties
FIrst, realize that stuff happens in the corporate world BEYOND what is posted to /.
& ca t=instant_messaging
Then after realizing how much bigger the world is than all of us, go here and do some reading.
http://news.yahoo.com/fc?tmpl=fc&cid=34&in=tech
Long story short, AOL, MS, and Yahoo! are all tripping over themselves to offer a corporate IM solution after they dropped the ball squabbling about standards and opening up each other's IM networks to each other. Right now, there are something like 30+ IM startups all trying to be number one in the corporate IM game. Currently, IBM/Lotus (didn't see that coming did you?) SameTime has like 65% market share in corporate IM.
MS does have some rudimentary IM stuff in older Exchange variants but its anemic for corp needs. They have a project called Greenwich which will be their corporate solution. It's mostly a collaborative effort with another IM startup.
Also, late last year AOL was awarded a patent for IM technology. Seems the original patent was filed for in '97 by Mirabilis, which AOL bought in '98. So, hence they have THE patent on IM now. What that holds remains to be seen...
Significantly, this enterprise package will include features that the free consumer version of IM lacks: ensuring that messages are transmitted over secure networks, with the capability to save messages for future reference, for example.
That was on the second page of the article.
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
Personally were I running a business this is about the last thing in the world I would bother spending any money on. That's just me though. Maybe there is some great benefit to this that I don't see. Someone make me a case for why I would need to spend some money on something like this. I'm curious here. Doubtlessly there's got to be something I'm missing.
Chat is taken very seriously in the financial services industry.
I'm writing a Jabber IM client for my Senior Design project, and if you're looking to write this client, you may consider looking into the Muse API.
From the echomine.org web page:
The Muse API is a Java API with the goal of integrating all network-collaboration services into one. The API will give an easy-to-use interface that allows you to log on to multiple services (ie. ICQ, AIM, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, IRC, Napster, Gnutella, Jabber, XMLRPC). There will be a client GUI Framework to combine the use of all these service under one easy-to-access API so that you can write GUI clients with much less effort.
AIM copied ICQ, which was the first 'real' and popular IM.
Yeah, like adding advertisements.
True, but they've alway made it very easy to remove:
grep -vU advert aim.odl > noadvert.odl
copy noadvert.odl aim.odl
I've always used GAIM for UNIX/Linux instant messaging. It was kinda buggy in the beginning, but it is really nice these days. GAIM for Windows will be good once they get some of the bugs out of it. Besides GAIM, I haven't tried much else except the standard clients, I'll have to give Kopete a try, it looks pretty smooth.
#!/