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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."
speculates on the possibility
just made me laugh.
There is no advantage to using one IM service over another, so why anybody switch?
I still fail to see what's wrong with ICQ, except for the fact that all !geek people have stopped using it...
Ah, to think of the time when everybody who used any IM program used ICQ. Those were the days...
It'll run into the same problem as all other new and supposedly better IM protocols -- "all my friends are on [AIM|ICQ|MSN|...] so I use that".
Interesting, but I don't see how Google would do it without a large amount of time. Trying to convince people like my little sister to give up her little world of AIM for something entirely new for no real benefit would be really difficult.
Google's business is to make things easier to find and understand. How would an instant messaging program be applicable to this mission? The question is what spin Google could put on IMing to make it their own. Just like GMail added conversations and the Google search function, GMessage would need a catch.
I'd like to go further and say that MSN is popular overseas and with lots of foreigners. Majority of americans I know use AIM; but everyone at school whos from India uses MSN like its their job.
May this post be indexed by spiders, and archived for all to see as my Internet epitaph.
I don't know if the story is anything to do with Jabber. I mean look at it this way; What would it mean if Google started its own IM service period?
Yahoo did it and what did that mean? AIM/AOL are still here. But the thought is interesting enough as it is.
As for an open protocol... I don't know if it would mean a whole hell of a lot. I like the IM but I also like the ability to use VoIP or Video if I want.
Whatever Google comes up with I can only speculate that the quality of the clientele would be a lot highr than either AOL or MSN. I'm using Y! now, but more as it's the only one I have after ruling the other two out that has any number of people to be able to chat with.
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
it always has and always will be "What are all my friends using".
It also seems a bit silly for Google to be interested in IM. Google's services always revolve around searching (even gmail), something that isn't very useful for IM. They could perhaps make finding buddies or finding past conversations easier, but other than that, I fail to see where google could work their magic.
If so, there is nothing particularly interesting about this. Sure, any piece of software that gets a direct link from the Google front page is going to have a massive advantage over its competitors, and yes, were that to happen, it would be nice if that software happened to use an open protocol with lots of open source clients.
The fact that he chose instant messaging as the application, and Google as the big powerful company with all the eyeballs is somewhat irrelevant, the same would be true of almost any application and almost any company with a massively popular website.
Of course, if the big powerful company just happens to be Google, the darling of Slashdot editors, then it certainly won't hurt his advertising click-through revenue :-)
Still, i would like it to happen. But if google wants to kill msn et all, jabber has to first support audio and video chat.
They are too busy with their current projects. Gmail has been in beta for almost half a year and it still isn't final. And still as a beta project, they made yahoo and msn catch up to provide more space.
I wonder how google IM would shape up aim, yahoo, msn and icq.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
All I care about is whether or not I get end-to-end encryption.
The reason Jabber is so great is because of its encryption support. I can load up gabber and use SSL (and end-to-end GPG encryption within *that*).
If Google gives me end-to-end encryption, Google will win me and everyone I can convince over. Everything else is irrelevant. The current state of IM security is abysmal.
That means that there will be a single party that can monitor who communicates with who (not ideal, but not that far from the existing cell phone situation), but not the *content*.
May we never see th
Pricewatch.com and pricegrabber.com are still beating froogle.google.com by a large margin.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Simple case of a crappy interface (icq) being trumped by a simple one (MSN). Love it or hate it, the MSN interface is very simple to use, everyone can figure it out. I use a clone of it for linux (aMsn) with a couple more features but still retaining that simple interface.
I used ICQ for years but it always seemed clunky, and had a million features that were useless. ALso MSN was the first with a webcam feature that just worked behind firewalls, and little things like games that people liked to play.
ICQ lost because they were perpetually in beta and even with years head start never managed to make a good client.
Information, dear boy, information. If they know what everyone it talking about, saying what they wished they had, etc, they can target ads more effectively at the rest of us.
Sort of reminds me of that saying (which I can't properly remember now): Beware of he who would control access to information, for in his heart, he wants to be your master.
Get your own free personal location tracker
Many posters are asking why Google, what would they add, etc..
What little vision!
First and foremost, searching archives of IM's sucks on almost every windows client there is. GAIM, Miranda, Trillian, AIM, MSN-IM, etc etc. Thats a niche waiting for them - they are the kings of search.
Second, for Google to be universal, they need contact management soon. They need to know WHO someone is. Orkut is a step there. Gmail's contact manager *sucks*.
Combine the two, AND an instant messenger that interoperates between all the networks ALA GAIM, and you suddenly have a complete profile, 6+ potential screennames, possibly a website, their gmail address, and voila - you have a strong awareness of who the user is.
NOW use THAT to improve search results - google for pages that Linus Torvalds wrote. Now google knows what his IM names are, what his webpage is, what his gmail address is, and can specify ALL of those pages containing those items as "better hits" than just any webpage. It can even do it transparently (hidden) for better security.
Taking it a step further, you now have the makings of a web-based contact management system - email, IM, blogs, profiles, images, all from their various packages.
Sounds visionary to me!
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
Will they switch? Sure they will. People switch because they're lemmings. Look at MSN. I guarantee most of the people I know on MSN only got it because somebody else they knew was on it, who got it because somebody else was on it...
... if there was only anyone else on so I could test this 'send message' functionality.. someone ... anyone ... please?!
So most people went on the IM service because someone they knew was on it. I fail to see what's wrong with this. What's the point of using an IM service if you have no one to talk to?
"Hey look at me, I'm so cool! I'm using OpenGnuInstantLinuxBSDMessengerGPL
Yet, a context-sensitive text ad, just like those in Gmail, might prove to be both more valuable to advertisers and less obnoxious to users.
If people were freaking out about context-sensitive text ads in their email, just imagine the reaction to the plan to "scan" IM messages for advertising.
samrolken
Planting seeds... I'm sure more than a few google employees read slashdot. What better way to prod them into jumping into the IM game than providing them with a nice healthy slashdot-debate to read over? We just took care of their proposal meeting for them.
Sure, it's not news, but since when is slashdot about news?
If they use SSL (https), just think how useful it would be to those of us that get blocked by corporate firewalls (from using non http/https ports).
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= - The Celtic - =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
And how is your post "interesting"? It's just some other guy complaining about the story. How many times do you need to be told: if you dont like a story, DONT READ IT, CLICK ON IT, OR MOST IMPORTANTLY POST TO IT!!!! How hard is that to understand?
Standard-based IM is all well and good for us, the technical elite. We don't want to run multiple IM clients to communicate with all of our friends. It's a nuisance, frankly. Have any of you used Yahoo Instant Messenger lately? They have a lot of new features that make it fun to use. IMvironments are cute little chat applets that allow for different, fun, styles of communication. So also does the ever expanding list of emoticons, translated to icons of course. Audibles are fun to play with, in a cartoonish way. Where is jabber? Still doing IRC-style communication in a window. Plain-jane, ho-hum, boring, boring, boring. Suitable for business, and I use it for that. I don't have the other instant messengers because nobody I care about uses them. No doubt there is a similar bells and whistles arms race going on on them. But where are the bells and whistles in jabber? My wife complains that I can't load an imvironment in GAIM.
There's something to be said for changing the protocol and client at your whim to add fun and interesting modes of communication.
After reading a number of comments here, it seems many people (including myself) agree that the major problem GoogleIM faces is that if all your friends use ServiceX, you are basically forced to use ServiceX as well.
The answer to this situation, IMHO, is for Google to release an IM program which has seamless integration with other IM services. This is offered in many third party IM applications, but a big Google brand on an application which could juggle multiple IM systems might just be enough to get people to use Google's application--which, of course, would require you to sign up for GoogleIM at download.
It would be a slow process of conversion, but if Google starts out with seamless integration, I think they have a chance of converting a significant number of users within a year.
An IM protocal is only as important to someone as the need to keep in touch with the people they know (who use such things).
When it comes to AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Y!M they're really all not that much different, so I use Trillian Pro (registered). My ICQ number is 6 digits.
What really matters to a lot of people who actually chat is the chat features of these clients.
IRC of course being the most opened, it has it's obvious problems though many people it enough to cope with them.
ICQ's chat has always and still sucks.
AIM's chat has very few selectable rooms of interest and entering them results in joining a chat room with about 5893493847 bots and 2 live people that don't know how to say anything but "ASL".
MSN's chat isn't all that great either, and most of the people I do know who generally use it at all complain about it most of the time.
The last remaining one worth mentioning then would be Yahoo chatrooms. Yahoo chat rooms have the most topics, including some divided by geographic location. They support voice in the room (a real plus) and though the bots are bad they're easily spotted.
Overall, I can honestly say I think Yahoo's chat rooms are the best of the major services though they too have serious problems. For starters, you almost HAVE to use a 3rd party client such as YahElite (Only available for Windows, but runs in Wine just fine) to stay safe from skript-kiddie boot-codes. And you will get private messages from tons of bots. Most importantly though, creating private rooms will not grant the person who created the room any kind of special room privileges so the rooms go mostly unmoderated. For some people this might be undesirable.
That's why this whole thing has been so high on my mind lately. Because I do like to chat and as I see it none of the chat services are perfect.
What's needed is a chat service that...
I have a lot of ideas on how a service like this could be done, but how to do it without either ungodly amounts of capitol or without making the system expensive to users is something I often ponder.
Even starting an opened source project to do this has the major issue of running the master servers for the service, something that a free and opened source project probably couldn't afford to do for long if the service ever got popular.
Chat is still a largely unsatisfied niche, since nobody has really done it right. Instant messages are so 90's. Someone needs to take chat to the next level, and Google could do it if they gave it some thought.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.