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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.
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
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
AIM copied ICQ, which was the first 'real' and popular IM.