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AOL-Yahoo-MSN Messaging Unified... in the Workplace Only
bakreule writes "Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo! are teaming up to link their separate instant messaging services for use in the workplace, 'the first major step by the industry leaders to enable computer users to communicate with one another no matter which of the three systems they use.' Sound to good to be true? It is. 'What this does not do,' Root said (yes, that's his name), 'is the holy grail of instant messaging, which is to allow anybody on any network to send a message to anybody on any other network.' It seems that the system, which is aimed for corporations, involves some MS software which acts as an intermediary between the different systems. Sounds like a fancy version of all the open source IM clients out there."
ICQ is very popular among German youth. Last I saw, their registration numbers were past 250,000,000. I'm still using my 3,000,000 number ;)
"These people look deep into my soul and assign me a number based upon the order in which I joined"
- Homer Simpson
More than enough BS
Right on - Jabber and Jabber4R (or JabberPy). Word.
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"This lays the groundwork for instant messaging to become as widespread and useful as e-mail is today," said Taylor Collyer
If it becomes as "widespread and useful as e-mail" then that means I'm going to have spam popping up on my screen every three seconds. Goodbye, Instant Messaging.
In any case, this is all nonsense. AOL, Yahoo, and The Beast should all just implement the server-to-server protocol used by Jabber. It's on the IETF standards track and will eventually be used by everyone who isn't one of those three.
Actually, if one of the big three (probably the smallest of the big three, whichever that is) implemented the protocol, the other two would pretty much have to.
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Hello to all,
S ID =2517926c4f71caed9f6bff1af6843dbd
:)).
This is welcomed news, but the people at Jabber (http://www.jabber.com) did something like this first. Using a Jabber client you can talk to the three other networks by using an special plugin installed on the server (http://www.jabber.org/user/userguide/).
Also Jabber is a very extensible platform that can be used almost for anything (like System monitoring, for example):
http://www.jabber.org/about/overview.php?PHPSES
Also as the original poster mentions, Gaim already does this without problems (even when Yahoo decides to change their protocol, which is almost every 6 months
Regards,
Jose Vicente Nunez Zuleta RHCE, SJCD, SJCP
Your aim:david scheme sounds alot like what jabber already does, when I am logged into a jabber server my friends on AIM appear to me as jabber users with nicks like david@aimgate.jabberserver. Presence information works just fine.
Logging will always be a problem, but jabber lets you transparently encrypt messages with gpg. Its EASY
This scenario and confusion is what email would have been like if standards weren't set and available for free use--imagine only being able to send an email to someone with the same service.
Instead, the selfless designers of internet protocols gave away their idea such that it could be implemented by anyone anywhere, and email is a valuable tool.
Compared to the greedy bastards that are trying to "own" IM, so the end result is that IM is barely more than a toy.
--
$tar -xvf
I agree. Jabber is a terrific protocol and server.
Miranda is the best Jabber client I have used (for Windows), GAIM for Linux.
I'll be honest - I've used both, and while philosophically I leaned towards Miranda, I've given up on it.
Why?
Because on multiple occasions, I've reported bugs with great detail regarding issues with connectivity, and after six releases, the issues never got better.
As it is even today, I can load Trillian or Gaim and have no problem connecting to the four corporate networks, but Miranda WONT. Thats pitiful.
Thats why I switched to GAIM - There are *many* plugins and options I really miss from Miranda, but those don't come close to comparing to the simple issue of protocol support. If I cant chat, I cant use the features (duh).
I'm not alone in it either - the threads I reported my issues in became some of the most-responded-to threads they have.
Yet still no fix months later.
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Such a thing is already on the way. Incidentally, Microsoft's Live Communication Server (which is the basis for this new interoperability) already uses SIP/SIMPLE as the basis for the protocol. From what I've heard, IBM is going in that direction for its next enterprise IM product, too. The standard isn't completely defined, yet, and every vendor has quirks. It's about like HTML was several years ago. But it's coming.
If your Jabber server has the right transports it can handle Yahoo, AIM/ICQ and MSN.
Actually, you can use any transport you want, you aren't restricted to your own server in any way: This is Jabber's beauty, that many servers can coexist instantly and (as long as it isn't deactivated, of course) talk to each other. Transports are just "servers" which you see as having all Yahoo/MSN/whatever users, with @ changed to % (e.g. fred%msn.com@msn.thetransport.net)