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Microsoft Messenger Architect On The Future Of IM
CowboyRobot writes "ACM Queue has an interview with Peter Ford, chief architect for MSN Messenger, by Eric Allman, CTO of Sendmail. They discuss the present and future states of IM, the current big players as industry shuffles toward standardization, some of the social implications of IM versus email or telephone, and technical issues such as using SIP as opposed to XMPP (Microsoft is pushing for SIP, everyone else seems to favor XMPP). They don't bring up Wallop, Microsoft's community application that will be built into Longhorn, but that's surely part of the long-term discussion."
Trillian works great for all my needs. IRC! Man that's where it's at. What bothers me, greatly I might add, is that while the majors like Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola are busy selling IM at whatever cost their last meeting brainfarted, it is highly probable that most non-nerd people think this is the way to go. They are 0wn3d by the marketspae'k, and it's trendy so hey, cool, they love it. And there's money in it for companies to gain money per character of text, or per 32byte-max transfer. (or is it 255? tee hee)
The pundits of chargeable IM services socialize the use of the service, as a Freudian brainwash, by forming IM parties with other-sexy-trendy-phone-pundits, and I sit back wondering what the fuck is happening to the world; it should be all free, or at least the cost of hardware. It's obviously a ploy to put a price on a few bytes of data, and slap a carriage charge on top of it. Which is why I'm not at all surprised this Microsoft guy, PETER FORD (from the interview) is talking about IM. It seems that the fancier the names of the new protocols are, the more money it's going to cost. But it's mumbo-jumbo to the end user, who would gladly fork over the cash just to make it go away (and just work). That's what these pundits are counting on.
One part of the article I found interesting was the design of voice mail. I agree. It would be better to build the message at the sender's location and *then* send it.
"Does that mean 10 years, five years, two years? I couldn't predict. Quite frankly, the thing that fights against it being quickly this time around is that the communities operating with these mutually incompatible protocols are quite large. If you look at AOL's cloud or the MSN cloud or the Yahoo cloud, you're talking about fairly large, significant systems. To have them migrate and interoperate with standard protocols will happen, but it is going to take time." This also assumes that AOL or MSN or Yahoo will cry uncle first. Who serious believes that any one of them will be the first to abandon their standard for an open standard when it could mean the end of their software? Remember, we are dealing with some *SERIOUS* egos here...
Microsoft is pushing for SIP.
IBM, which sells the #1 selling business IM solution (Lotus Instant Messaging), is using SIP.
Apple is using SIP.
So who are the "everyone else" who want XMPP?
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
So they talk about building 'community' and enhancing 'social communication' but they never seem to indicate whether this 'society' will be exclusive or inclusive. Will it be inclusive as long as you're willing to sign NDAs and pay licenses to use the technology?
The biggest difference here is that Microsoft wants to use the simple input panel rather than the extensible one.
While the architecture of XMPP allows for theoretically broader support of handwriting recognition systems, you rarely need more than two on any given system (your native language and English).
I have a feeling Microsoft will win this small battle.
I have been pwned because my
What's the difference between SIP and XMPP?
The interviewer says:
Microsoft, Lotus, Sun, and Novell seem to have settled on SIP. Intel, H-P, Hitachi, Sony, and more or less the entire open source world is going toward XMPP, sometimes better known as Jabber.
and the poster says:
Microsoft is pushing for SIP, everyone else seems to favor XMPP.
Yeah, it's fun to paint the world in black and white but this is just a blatant lie.
When men used to be men
Microsoft's community application that will be built into Longhorn
...
So IM will be build into Windows, and Netmeeting, and this and that and whatnot. Isn't this getting slightly ridiculous to bundle everything in an OS ? I'm sure nobody wants *all* of that installed on their hard-drive, just as I wouldn't want to install all the packages that come with my Linux distro CD, but instead I want to choose what I install and nothing else, and save disk space.
What's beyond me is why don't we hear a great number of people (regular users) complaining about this waste of disk space, and also why so few OS experts voice their concern about the fact that the OS/application boundary in Windows is so blurry it's frightening in terms of security and stability
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
IMs are fine and dandy but when are they going to work on improving video confrencing. Typing is tedious but strides haven't been made in free video confrencing software. Perhaps that should be part of their implementation of the next "IM" software. Afterall even the old Netmeeting has a chat window you can bring up.
I used ICQ for a while, then uninstalled it, multiple times had to uninstall YIM that got installed with Netscape before Mozilla really came into play, fought kids installing GG (polish IM) on classroom computers, generally did a lot to get rid of instant messengers from my life. Am I weird or what?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
There are two doors. The door to your right leads to SIP, and the salvation of Redmond. The door to the left leads back to the matrix, to XMPP, and to the end of your species. As you adequately put, the problem is choice. But we already know what you're going to do, don't we? Already I can see the chain reaction, the chemical precursors that signal the onset of emotion, designed specifically to overwhelm logic, and reason. An emotion that is already blinding you from the simple, and obvious truth: XMPP is going to die, and there is nothing that you can do to stop it.
I do agree that you will see consolidation over time. You could probably argue that the e-mail experience that you and I and a lot of others lived through over the past 20 to 25 years is probably going to be repeated--perhaps more quickly than last time because the Internet makes that kind of evolution easier.
We're gonna go through this spam thing again, aren't we? Man it's like living in Groundhog Day. On the other hand, this does give us a use for Bunker Buster bombs - instant localized retaliation against any spammer. And their families. And friends. And neighborhood.
Which is as it should be.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
Protocols will become more proprietary, telco companies will continue to *squeeze* money out of consumers for sending text messages over networks which would otherwise be utilizing much more bandwidth for a normal voice call, and proprietary IM providers such as AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo will not collectively work toward a standard, because they have their hands too deep in consumers' pockets to see that it would benifit more people than just them to work together for a common good.
No, I don't think the major IM players will settle on a standard. The best thing we can hope for is that the Jabber protocol catches on and we all have an open IM standard.
That's most likely not going to happen, though, until the rest of the world catches on to the whole OSS movement. And at that point, there are going to be so much better things out there than text IM that people are working on together that it won't matter anyway.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I'm a bit unclear about the differences between SIP and XMPP and where Jabber, which could have been used as an interoperability standard, all fit together.
At the high end, these all seem like simple namespace issues and would map onto Jabber nicely. An AIM user, for example, could be user@aim but the end user doesn't need to know that, they could just be presented with an icon representing AOL or something.
The real issue is that there doesn't seem to be much in the way of motivation into making the IM systems compatible. Due to programs like Gaim and Trillian, less users are demanding it.
So the question for me is where's the money in it for AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft? AOL is clearly selling IM to companies like T-Mobile for phone connectivity, but I can't imagine that "pays the bills" for the millions of messages they route.
How is IMing profitable and what incentive do these companies really have in making interoperability a reality?
BTW- I see the real danger here in that IM is replacing other technology, such as TTY. I even wrote about this in my blog about a month ago: (yes shameless plug)
TTYs and the Internet
- Serge
Okay, I'll admit that I didn't finish reading the interview, because to be quite frank, I don't see the need for an 8 page interview on instant messaging technology, nor do I have the patience to read one.
;)
Seriously, I'm not trolling, but am I the only one who is saying to himself, "it's just IM, what's the big deal." Maybe there is something massive to gain by pushing for one tech over another in this area, but come on, it's just IM. What's perhaps even sillier is the concept of someone being a chief architect of an instant messaging program, but that's a whole different subject. Time to stop letting MS employees pick their own titles, I'd say.
Can someone enlighten us doubting Thomases (Thomasi?), because, at the risk of sounding redundant, it's just IM!
Meanwhile, I plan to wash my hands of the whole mess and use Jabber. Remember back when we had standards, and the internet was decentralized? It actually worked - there wasn't a single point of failure. When was the last time the entire email system went down? Jabber can offer the same reliability, and you don't aren't locked into a single server or client.
Besides being decentralized, Jabber tries to offer gateways, and many Jabber clients (such as GAIM) also play the "keep up with the proprietary protocol" game. So have the best of both worlds - get a Jabber account somewhere, and whenever your friends's servers lock out their clients of choice, convince them to get a Jabber account also.
Litigious bastards
I'll post AC, since you're commenting on diction, and not substance.
Basically this is the use:
1. A source of opinion; a critic: a political pundit.
So like, someone who is cheering the IM scam on.
I read about wallop briefly.. and it it quite threatening to my linux desktop usage if it should succeed.. Being a social geek, I make friends, join groups. And odds are several will demand wallop for communications (Clubs at university, charitable organizations) if it is all it is supposed to be. Solution? I realize there are web-based deelys... but they really really smell... I could set up PHP-Nuke occasionally, but people will probably prefer wallop 10 years from now when longhorn becomes mature (by way of how many computers run it). Sortof like when MSN took over IM where I live... except this next time, one may not be able to create a linux client.
That's a great story... I don't use IM or chat very often, so I haven't thought much about them. So a lot of what was said was fairly relevatory for me.
The thing that interests me is the way that Ford talked about differences in accessibility (can people you don't know communicate with you?), and verifiability (do I know who you are?) in various systems, and how one system (say chat) might be used to allow rough and tumble anonymous communications with strangers, while another (IMing) might be limited to friends on a whitelist.
Another characteristic that's particularly important to me is real time vs. instant response. I *hate* systems that interrupt me in real time, which is why I use email instead of IMs. I've pretty much stopped answering my phone, too, because I can, and now I depend on my machine to queue up calls, so I can deal with them when it makes sense to do so.
The question that all of this raises, for me, is whether or not it's practical to have a comprehensive messaging service that will allow people to tweak all of these different parameters in combinations that they like. Is there any need for email and IMs to be distinct?
Maybe we need a messaging "account" to be open, and another to be whitelisted, or one to be real time, and another to be queued -- but can't they be the same general sort of accounts, configured differently?
(I'm not talking about trying to twist email itself into this shape... but about a new system that would cover much of the same ground.)
In this sense I see even Jabber as a dead-end - give me GAIM and the other multinetwork clients anyday, and open up more peer networks to them as they are populated.
Microsoft Dream (2003)
End users are beginning to ask for it. They get jazzed about the idea of being able to start an IM session with somebody, then if that person goes offline at some point, the message being sent would be saved and retrieved at a later time.
IBM Reality (1972)
You can also leave a message for wdd to receive when he logs on by typing: send 'message' user(wdd) logon.
Long live XMPP. The MUC protocol is a superset of IRC functionality.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
XMPP-Charter
SIP-Charter
sig(h)
For reference.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
when i read interviews with microsoft tech people, they always seem to come across as real technophiles, people concerned with the bits and bytes, if you will. somewhere along the way, it seems, marketing and finance must enter the coding cubicles and say something. it almost sorta reminds of the russian military. for every division (or whatever), there was a political officer. it seems there must be the equivalent in microsoft development departments. can't one of them just say no, we're going to do things the right way. it seems the fish is rotten from the top. really sad if you think about it.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Since Novell is acquiring SuSE, will they be supporting their own SIP IM client on SuSE linux? I think that would be a really great thing!
It's good, at least, that gaim/trillian developers collaborate in cracking proprietary protocols.
The Raven
Basically, apt-get is a kick-ass system for making sure your Debian system is up to date, has the latest packages installed, and manages conflicts. At the core, what is an IM system about? Making sure your message 'packages' are up to date, has the latest messages 'installed', and manages conflicts, that is, a reply had been requested, yet hasn't been sent! All the key infrastructure was already in place, including an interface (dselect), which could easily be ported to all the required platforms to allow easy reading and sending of instant messages.
The first step was to use apt-get itself to distribute a modified apt.sources file, which contained the IP addresses of all of the IM clients on the network. Some people had suggested DNS as a solution to this, but my feeling was that DNS wouldn't scale so well (this was a large LAN, with over 10,000 clients...I'd like to see DNS cope with that!!). Once each client had it's apt.sources file updated, you could basically send a 'message' (your ASCII message encapsulated into a .deb file by a custom packager I created that runs as a background process) to any host specified in the apt.sources file. To do this, I had to create a daemon-ized version of apt-get, listening on a predefined port. The daemon would be contacted by the apt-get client, would receive the .deb package containing the message, and then 'install' it to the dselect based client on the receiving system.
Without trying to sound like I'm blowing my own trumpet, the system was a huge success, and the many features of apt-get for package management really came in handy for managing IM flows. For instance, just say you've just sent a message to a colleague via apt-get saying "Let's meet for lunch at 1pm":
apt-get install host=fred-pc "Let's meet for lunch at 1pm"
But then...you're called into an emergency meeting and you can't make lunch until 2pm. You need to 'upgrade' your message to the latest version:
apt-get upgrade host=fred-pc "Make that 2pm!"
Easy! The whole project was essentially wrapped up in 6 months, and because of the open-source nature of apt-get, we'd managed to port to all of the platforms in our specification. If Microsoft can swallow their pride a little, I think they could really learn something from the power of apt-get!
I don't know if you use talk (an early Unix-based IM program) at all anymore. You said you're not a big IM user. There was a certain pleasure--at one o'clock in the morning in a machine room at the computing center--in launching up a talk session with someone to help you understand how to rebuild the G partition on your system. That was different from using e-mail. That captures some of the difference between IM and e-mail today. I think that's important.
EA Good point. I remember those late-night sessions, too. And you're right, they were really cool.
Who was in a computer room and who helped rebuilding that partition?Programs like Trillian only make the problem worse. If everyone in the world had to talk to everyone else, Trillian's solution would be to have everyone sign up with every single IM service separately. At that point everyone has one service in common so everyone might as well subscribe from the four they won't use. But who decides which four will go?
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Yes, there is a lot of common ground. You can wire up email to be instant using many mail clients, and you can wire up IM using clients such as Exodus to provide an Email-like inbox. There are also gateways to transport one to the other (e.g. you receive a Jabber message, something converts it to email with an appropriate reply address so that it is converted back to Jabber on the way out, and vice versa for email to Jabber.)
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
It's good to see them remembering the old school application such as talk. I myself remember the good old days of talk and getting those request sessions. Ahhh, how those days were so innocent and there were not any porn bots around in the system.
There was, in my opinion, a glaring omission in this article: no mention of IRC. I find this interesting because there is no reason why IRC shouldn't be adopted as the protocol of choice for text instant messaging. It's more stable than all the others. It interoperates nicely. There are IRC servers running on all kinds of operating systems. Endless clients.
How many millions of people use IRC? Why not adopt it as a mainstream system? I was surprised that the interviewer, being from Sendmail, so glaringly ignored throwing this into the mix. IRC can do everything instant messaging can, and then some.
Both the Mr. Ford and the interviewer failed in their mission: the former may not be much of an architect if he's willing to overlook this, and the latter should've asked more incisive questions.
Cheers,
Eugene
http://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
"The pundits of chargeable IM services socialize the use of the service, as a Freudian brainwash, by forming IM parties with other-sexy-trendy-phone-pundits, and I sit back wondering what the fuck is happening to the world; it should be all free, or at least the cost of hardware. It's obviously a ploy to put a price on a few bytes of data, and slap a carriage charge on top of it. Which is why I'm not at all surprised this Microsoft guy, PETER FORD (from the interview) is talking about IM. It seems that the fancier the names of the new protocols are, the more money it's going to cost. But it's mumbo-jumbo to the end user, who would gladly fork over the cash just to make it go away (and just work). That's what these pundits are counting on."
Fair enough. Now answer this. Who's going to pay for reoccurent costs? Even if the clients are free, and the servers are free, and the community ssh'ed in to maintain the machines. Who's going to pay for the bandwith, or the occasional visit to replace dead hardware? We all can sneer at the crowd that doesn't live and breath technology. And wants to use it as part of their social structure. But ultimately it's their money that carries technology forward, by spreading it around like seeds, and makes it cheaper than the geeks ever would. Please thank them on your way out the door to get that inexpensive video card.
I think it's this, IMHO:
Open your web browser and type slashdot.org
If you're going to draw parallels to email, as so many have done with these discussions in the past, you have to consider right now... how much of the world's mail infrastructure is handled by the 'open standard', SMTP, and how much of it is handled by Exchange?
Exchange may be quite popular with corporations, but outside the corporation the servers tend to be a little more standard. You might see a mail going via Exchange all the way to the boundaries of the company's network, then via SMTP to another company, and back to Exchange again.
It would be interesting to see this same phenomenon emerge here. It isn't a stretch because Jabber to SIMPLE gateways have been done already, companies such as Altova supporting both in their servers.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
No matter how many IM there are in the world, the ones left are the ones that make profit.
Easy to use as existing products? Sure! Just one more button to press... you know, the one with the little padlock on it.
Hard to build? Well... it's been done for pretty much every email client already. In fact, it's been done for at least four IM clients already too, and only two of the ones I'm thinking of are Jabber clients!
Microsoft really have to start hiring smarter developers if their development team thinks either of these two is a "challenge".
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Supporting Jabber is more than letting a person connect to the server and become available. You need to be able to register for transports and other services. Actually even GAIM doesn't do the more advanced features particularly well, and the only one I've 'heard' works well is Miranda, which is open source but Windows only. Anyone want to port it?
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Good call on the closed source comment. It's okay if closed source interfaces are flexible enought to adapt to everchanging opensource plugins.
People who know me, usually get in touch with me via email.
Do you buy computers and Internet access subscriptions for your family?
If you're happy with your IMs being sniffed left and right, feel free to use Gaim et al. My friends and I have migrated to Trillian as our main IM because it does all the major IM protocols, is feature rich, and lets us encrypt our IMs. Sure, its vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks then again so is ssh, ssl, etc but it sure beats plain-text.
Gaim is feature poor and the developers refuse to interoperate with Trillian's secure protocol. The secure Gaim spin-off doesn't want to play with Trillian either, they want their own gpg-based system.
Regardless, Trillian is excellent for Win32 users. Its a shame there hasn't been a Linux port of it yet.
Why didn't you read the article? Sun, IBM and Microsoft prefer one standard, SIP. HP, Intel and most open source people prefer another, XMPP (aka Jabber). Oh yeah, SIP is also used by the mobile phone companies for voice communication.
So Jabber is one of the two (only two) big players, and Microsoft is migrating to an open protocol that is very similar to it.
yeah, you've got some client to client abilities (dcc), but that's not the way it's usually used.
They talk about 'chat' systems in general, and how it's not the same as IM. It's left as an exercise for the reader to pull out the quotes to slap parent poster down.
P.S. Did you actually read all 8 pages of the indepth interview?
IMs are fine and dandy but when are they going to work on improving video confrencing.
Apple has made great strides in this regard.
Sure, they weren't first, but as Apple stuff usually does it just works...
Apple docs talk about having to open up ports, but when I tested it out I didn't have any ports forwarded and both ends were behind cable Routers (in fact one was behind two routers bridged wirelessly) and it worked very well using two DV cameras.
WTF, precisely, is a Freudian brainwash?
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
Why is a guy who has a goddamn CODING STYLE named after him INTERVIEWING a guy who "architected" a ripoff of TWO successful p2p-chat protocols?
Did I miss an edit in the force, or what?
irc systems are notoriously vulnerable to attack (DOS et. al) and last time i checked, the irc world was shrinking, fast -- whole nets are shutting down.
nobody wants to run IRC servers because of their reputation, and they're not user friendly in the faintest sense.
and above all that, IRC is full of technophile purist snobs and newbies are usually "discouraged" from returning. yeah - that's a recipe for future growth.
From the article:
Did this make anybody else go, "TCP/IP over XML, anyone?"
(Yeah, I know they meant "instead of XMPP," but the wording *did* confuse me at first :-))
"People really are sheep."
And maybe they just aren't geek "gotta have the latest 'Oh look! Shiney!' technology" sheep. It's easy to mock what we don't understand. Those who have different priorities in life (Oh lookie! The latest LOTR is out. Wow! a cellphone that doubles as a pez dispenser). Now why don't you STFU and smile. Smile at the fact that those "sheep" is what helps pay your bills so you can go out and buy the latest geek toy, just like all the other geeks (Mooo!).
(only the AC parent got it all right!)
SIP and Jabber are indeed both text-based, SIP looks like HTTP, Jabber is XML based. Both are extensible. SIP is already used in internet telephony. Jabber is open-source. SIMPLE is based on SIP and XMPP is Jabber, and both are pushing for standardization. SIMPLE has a head start, but Jabber is lobbying hard.
"In our tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interest."
There is no technical comparison of SIP vs XMPP. From indepth one I would expect to see why features of SIP are better or worse than features of XMPP. They don't even list features to compare.
Also, they talk about XMPP and ignore Jabber user community, which has recently overgrown ICQ community by amount of users.
They talk about interoperability IM-gateway in a future tense, whil most of Jabber users already use interoperability today. For example, my Jabber client doesn't communicate directly to my ICQ or AIM buddies - it does it through the Jabber server instead.
I don't wonder they don't talk about personal/SOHO Jabber servers, which some percentage of Jabber users connect to, instead of direct connecting to public server, in a process to communicating with the rest of the world. Of course, Microsoft prefers everyone will connect directly to MSN - they don't like people building communities out of their control.
And, yes, IRC is missed. I don't like some features of IRC protocol personally too, but the fact is that IRC is here for many years, has a community, applications, and still good concepts.
Well, what do you expect from the guy, who works for Microsoft (the company responsible for so many viruses due to poor architectural design of their products) and Sendmail (the company responsible for so many spam due to poor architectural design of their main product)?
I am so disappointed that I wasted my time on RTFA.
Less is more !
To put it in perspective, Peter Ford has been a SIP advocate as long as I can remember, even for other problems. I worked with him when he was working in other divisions.
So where everybody else in this thread reads "Microsoft has chosen SIP as their IM protocol", I read "Peter Ford is still advocating SIP as a general solution".
Not to belittle him, though - he's one of the most brilliant people I've ever worked with.
was about the Picturephone being a few years away.
The problem I think is not the technology but the market. Remember that AT&T failed to GIVE those things away.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I'd say that donations could be a better all around model than gouging.
For example: without altering my firewall config, I get far far better cam performance with MSN than I do with Yahoo. Interesting point, if one is talking about Microsoft's protocols. (And yes, I *do* use cam for exactly what you are suspecting.)
Secondly, what the fuck is this point ahout?:
Yahoo has queued messages for years, it's one of the things which I love about Yahoo.
MSN is all about re-doing windows in a messenger: same crap all over again, with an improved NetMeeting (which as I said, really has very good video performance).
AOL is in my opinion just an add-on, for years rubbish and not much better now. It's just an extension to the AOL 'portal environment' and in its own way a logical extension of the same. OK, but not breathtaking.
ICQ and Yahoo though, are very very different: they build real communities, and are NOT JUST ABOUT IM.
Yahoo for one -- and yeah I just love this IM -- is just bursting with features, like IMvironments, Archived messages, Queueing, had Cam *way* before other clients even considered it, and has a thriving chat-mode which makes conferencing in NetMeeting look like something out of the Stone Age.
Whyowhy doesn't Yahoo *advertise* it's own brilliance? It has so much good stuff, and it behaves like Apple. Invent gobsmackingly cool apps, and then halfheartedly advertise them. And all the while Microsoft papers the planet with adverts which announce a 'brand! new! chat! system!' for windows.
Great.
Nalfy
-- Despair is an operating system that ANY human being can run, sort of a psychological JAVA --
the mobile world (Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson et al.) have created their own (open!) IM standard.
That is the direction they are slowly heading, so either way we are stuck using their clients.. if one is offered..
Though i agree with you about Trillian, when I'm on windows its my only client.. Its too bad it wont function well under wine...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I am the Architect. I created the messenger. I've been waiting for you. You have many questions, and although the process has altered your instant messages, you remain irrevocably human. Ergo, some of my chat rooms you will understand, and some of them you will not. Concordantly, while your first chat may be the most pertinent, you may or may not realize it is also the most irrelevant.
"another forum among the mobile carriers called Wireless Village, and those guys are driving not only an architecture that's very similar to the other two architectures, but also a separate set of protocols."
Does this strike anyone else as stupid? They want to have a wireless text chat protocol that could be supported, by what...phones? I mean the idea of chat as opposed to email is synchronous versus asynchronous communication. If I'm standing there with a phone in my hand want to discuss something synchronously I'm just going to give them a ring, and...gasp...talk. Disclaimer: I haven't read the wireless text protocol, so there's probably something I'm missing here. Anybody care to elaborate....
After a while I migrated to another system and forgot to bring my password with me. What are you supposed to do? I dunno, email someone or something...
Now I've got that sorted out, but the Jabber server knocks me off every few hours. I guess that's alright as long as I'm not using IM for work, but...
As much as I want to, I just can't recommend Jabber to my non-Linux friends. If there was a professionally run server I could, but how could it ever be as cheap as ICQ without the ad revenue or MSN without the loss-leader?
EA Microsoft, Lotus, Sun, and Novell seem to have settled on SIP. Intel, H-P, Hitachi, Sony, and more or less the entire open source world is going toward XMPP, sometimes better known as Jabber. Are those two communities ever going to speak to one another?
PF I think so. Over time users will demand that, so you can imagine it working out in different ways.
the use of "over time" shows that they know what is needed now, but wont implement it simply cos it doesnt serve "them" much.
very closed way of thought for someone with those credentials.
Because it's a couch trip!
If you are that paranoid about security, use Gabber or Psi with GnuPG. That is not vulnerable to man in the middle attacks.
Well, not unless you're dumb enough to give out your private key and your passphrase. :-)
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
That's awesome actually. When I (and much of the Jabber community) first saw iChat we were wondering why it didn't allow connection to the world of Jabber, because the UI is possibly the prettiest of any and all of the IM clients around. So it seems it does indeed use it somehow... very interesting.
Someone want to donate me a Mac to play with? I'm so poor... ;-(
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
He just mentioned Trillian. The point is the dumb consumism of your capitalist society.
Paying for IM is like paying for breathing air.