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."

Comments

What about the others?

[Lurgen]

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.

Re:Eh...

[bytesmythe]

Have you heard of jabber?

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. :)