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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."
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.
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.
Because there is a major advantage to switching to an open IM protocol.
:)
For one, you can write your own client to work with the service(s). Secondly, the service(s) are not dependant on a specific client so the IM network as a whole is substantially more secure.
I love jabber. Checkout Coccinella.
There are multitudes of other clients available, widely, for just about any platform you can think of.
Just like other open source projects, open source IM protocol(s) bring 'choice' back into the users hands. Sure, you can download Trillian or whatever and get on multiple IM services - but it's messy and the proprietary protocols (particularly Yahoo) are constantly being changed to prevent other messenger apps from working on their networks.
Just love it. Man, hope Google does do this. *Laughs* Like I needed another reason to love Google.
"Well, considering how many people dropped Hotmail like a bad habit as soon as gmail came out, I think that there's a good change a Google IM program might have the same effect."
On the other hand, dropping Hotmail just involves telling everyone your new email address. Not necessarily a trivial task, but they can still talk to you.
If people are to change to another IM protocol, it will very possibly have to be able to talk to AIM at least to start. Otherwise it'll be difficult to get the critical mass of people to transfer.
In short:
Change of email is a personal decision; you don't need to force others to change with you.
Change of IM is the opposite; for the most part, for other people to talk to you, they need to change too.
There's that, plus the fact that ICQ was the first wide-scale IM client. Unfortunately, it died a death of bloat. The fact that it had a hundred memory-gobbling, lag inducing, epileptically flashing "features" was probably a larger nail in its coffin than the inconvenience of ICQ numbers.
I was a fan of ICQ up until v2000. It had a lot more useful features, and a History mechanism that couldn't be beat. Then, they dropped the good logging mechanism and started adding a whole bunch of useless "search bar" type of garbage that just slowed the program up.
Luckily, that's when Trillian started to hit the scene. The funny thing is, I have Trillian Pro, and it's loaded up with plugins like an RSS reader and all kinds of search crap... but it's less intrusive and more integrated, and I find it to be a benefit.
Hopefully now, if Google IM takes off, Trillian will start supporting Jabber natively (instead of via a plugin).
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
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.