How Google Could Overthrow AIM

An anonymous reader writes "There's an interesting article over at Apple-X.net that speculates on the possibility of an instant-messaging service offered by Google that would be based on the open Jabber protocol. If Jabber was supported by a major company like Google, it could dominate over proprietary services such as AIM or MSN."

Comments

Go Google.

[caluml]

"Nothing for you to see here. Please move along."
Heh - same as always :)

I'd love to see Google get in with Jabber. Joogle? I use Jabber. But everyone I try to get on there simply says: But all my friends are on MSN. Some people have never ever heard of Yahoo, AIM, or the old classic, ICQ. Go Google, I say. Oh, and don't be evil. Although I'll be using SSL and GPG over Jabber, as usual.

Re:why?

[nkh]

If (and only if) it's based on Jabber and can communicate with every Jabber-compliant existing client, it will be easy to filter all the advertisements by dropping the unwanted XML tags.

GAIM

[raquelita]

GAIM is another open souce muliplatform and multi IM protocol client.

I use it in Linux and Win, for messaging in MSN, ICQ and Jabber :-)

Re:Jabber Quality

[tiptone]

Jabber isn't a client, it's a protocol. So i'm not sure what client you're using it at work, but it's not Jabber. i use Gaim for Jabber, here at work where everything is Windows or Linux.

Gaim doesn't support all the features of Jabber, if you're a windows user Exodus is really one of the best clients (MHO).

Hello? Google already owns an IM client.

[Elwood P Dowd]

Google owns Hello. This is a photo-oriented IM client that they got along with Picasa, the (excellent) iPhoto knockoff.

I hope everyone who just said Google doesn't care about IM kicks themself in the head. You dumbasses.

Hello is pretty, & it works with Blogger & Picasa. It is good Windows software, which is all that Google seems to be interested in for the desktop.

Apple is supporting Jabber

[HELLO.JPG]

Apple is already working on this.

You can now host your own iChat server. Instant Messaging serves as a vital means of communication for organizations of all sizes, so it's useful to deploy and run your own private and secure IM server. Based on the open source Jabber project, the new iChat server in Tiger Server lets your company protect its internal communications by defining its own namespace, and use SSL/TLS encryption to ensure privacy. The iChat server works with both the iChat client in Mac OS X Tiger and popular open source clients available for Windows, Linux and even PDAs.

http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/tiger/

Google already has an instant messenger

[ElliotLee]

When they acquired Picasa, they also got Picasa Hello, which is now effectively Google Hello.

Re:why?

[galfy]

If you think IM client with web interface is good idea you can start testing Laffer http://laffer.sf.net/ which is open source project and work quite well for such new project.

Re:why?

[danielsfca2]

> In fact, I really can't think of a single down side to using a webapp for instant messaging.

Ok. I'll help you:

- I don't want a damn browser running all the time just to have access to IM!
- I don't want to have to be online just to review a chat log!
- Either "A," "B," or "C" below:
--A. On MSIE/Win, every time MSIE crashes, I'd prefer it not take down my IM client too. And vice versa.
--B. On non-msie/Win, I'd like to have a notification icon in the "tray."
--C. On my Mac, I'd prefer the IM client have its own Dock icon rather than being yet another browser window. I'd also like a menu-bar extra (similar to MS "tray" icons).
- I'd like sound notifications, and little temporary pop-up notifications. And not little browser popups. How are you going to handle notifications? Just to get sound, you'd need to be running a damn plugin or FLASH just to provide a sound notification! Holy bloat, batman!
- Maybe I'd like to run a script locally when a certain contact signs on. How could you securely implement a browser-based IM client that could do that?
- The same reason I hate the webmail-as-the-only-interface-to-email trend--I don't want to have to load a bunch of redundant and inefficient HTML and ads for every single message I open, every time I look back at the inbox. But change "message I open" to "message I send or receive."
- Maybe I'd like audio and video chat. No, WITHOUT a bunch of unreliable and highly unstable browser "plugins" or ActiveX controls.
- One refresh of the buddy-list window goes bad and you're looking at an error message in your buddy-list window instead of an IM client. A real client can continue trying to reconnect.
- Unlike e-mail, IM requires lots of dynamic-ness. So you can guarantee yourself that if ANYONE implements a web-based, feature-rich IM client, it'll be highly proprietary. Read "highly-IE-only."
- And if you're going to use Java to do achieve some of those aims without stooping to stupid ActiveX, IE lock-in, etc? Why not just offer it as a normal executable too then?

> Personally, I don't mind that. At least I'd know that ALL settings and history are saved between machines instead of the classic issue

Whoa there, two very different ideas here:
Storing contacts and settings on the server (like Jabber does): Good. I'm all for it.
Making the interface server-side and translating it to HTML, and making that the only interface to the service: Very, very bad.
You don't need to do the latter to accomplish the former.