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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."
Try Gaim
Its not as polished as Trillian, but its OSS and cross platform, and thats whats important!
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
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.
SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) has been around for a long time and AFAIK is a binary protocol. SIMPLE is built on top of SIP and provides the instant messaging functionality.
XMPP is relatively new and is based on XML (hence why it's so extensible.) There are two parts, the core (which might as well be equivalent to SIP's core) and the IM extensions.
The glaring practical difference is that there seem to be about zero open-source SIP servers, and about a dozen open-source XMPP servers (going off the list at JabberStudio which might not represent all of them.)
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
SIP most certainly is a text based protocol, and even more certainly is extensible.
SIP messages look like HTTP messages, but can be encased in either TCP or UDP packets. (Which means you can add new HTTP style headers, just as web browsers do)
SIP is mostly used for carrying VoIP session information at the moment (as an SDP message body), but SIMPLE would work really great for carrying IM.
Netmeeting is no longer going to be a part of Windows. Windows and MSN Messenger are already performing much of what NetMeeting originally did. On a side note, does this mean Microsoft innovated with the IM clients? NetMeeting is a pretty old client app.
NetMeeting was useful in that it brought decent IM to a consumer grade OS (Windows 98), but I can recollect CUSeeMe around 1993.
Go somewhere random
Apple are using SIP for negotiating A/V communications establishment. They are using OSCAR for remote presence and messaging, and Jabber for local/rendezvous presence and messaging.
So, they are using XMPP in the local messaging stuff, but SIP to negotiate the exchange of A/V streams. Which is really what the two protocols were designed for.
The SIP pushed for by MS discussed is actually an extension called SIMPLE.
If you want proof of iChat using XMPP, either install a packet sniffer on your network, or run "strings", "otool -tV" or the 3rd party "class-dump" utility on the executable for iChatAgent, and grep the output for "Jabber".
"Civis Europaeus sum!"