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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."
Finally a service that would focus on the messaging, not on locking people out.
I used to be a hardcore ICQ User (still have it installed with a few contacts now)... but the mass public moved to MSN all of a sudden -- is this in part to the fact that Microsoft shoved it down our throats?
ICQ can do offline messaging, which MSN can't without an annoying add-in installed.
ICQ can do SMS, so can MSN now, but with another add-in... this is all previously achieved technology.
I welcome the concept of Google making an Instant Messenger, please do! They'd probably do a better job at it without almost nightly downtimes of their servers.
this might just be what it takes to make me an IMer
RArr!
This isn't even a rumor. It's basically one guy saying he wishes Google would start a Jabber-based messaging service. How is this front page material?
"No, no, no. Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."
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.
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." --George Orwell
AIM is already very deeply embedded with many people, even some corporations use it.
;)
Jabber's been around, along with MSN, and Yahoo, still most people I know (personal and online life) use AIM.
You forget that this major ISP that is the largest on the planet, kinda, includes AIM in it's program
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I don't know if their ad-supported model would work in IM, though. I prefer my IM windows to be small and inconspicuous - I don't know if I'd like having text ads (of any size) cluttering up my display.
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We live in a world of fads and ICQ was a fad. When the early adopters started gloating about their low low ICQ #'s it got on some people's nerves and it just started to go away.
That said, I never used ICQ. The fact that you needed to actually have a # to chat with someone was insanely stupid. AIM and MSN caught on because remembering "sexylady69" was easier than remember "42542432". What if I confused her for "KolageLezBian"... man I would have been fucked.
The only reason I have Messenger installed on all my computers is to give me a popup when I have a new message in my hotmail account.
If google can popularize Gmail enough, and integrate it with their messenger service, I can see alot of people switching over.
Triple points if they could get it to work with the other messenger services seamlessly. I would rather have one client, and be able to talk to everyone. Although there are probably some legal/technical issues to prevent this from working properly, it would definitely give me incentive to switch to an all-google solution for my personal communications.
Quadruple points if Google bought Vonage or a VoIP company and integrated everything seamlessly. That would be cool, but a little scary.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
I'd really like this if it meant I could search my IMs the way Google allows the searching of GMail (as I understand it). With AOL instant messenger, which I use due to all my friends using it, there's no archive at all, so a good chunk of my daily correspondence is lost forever. If there was some privacy-friendly way that I could store all my IMs and search them for important links and discussions I've had, using Google's powerful tools, I would definitely jump ship and try to bring as many people with me as possible.
While ICQ may have had some usefull features (feel free to dig through the 450 page manual), the interface was awfull. It got killed by AIM and MSN because they were simple to use.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Any version beyond "ICQ98" was extremely bloated, and those who weren't offended by the bloat were offended by the presence of AOL, who had acquired ICQ and was attempting to deprecate it in favor of AIM. Many of us can also recall the blatant security vulnerabilities inherent to the ICQ protocol, including "ICQ identity theft," which was somewhat commonplace around 1999.
Do you like German cars?
I think we all will switch to Jabber, but I don't think the push will come from big companies. It will come from ISPs offering Jabber service as part of your paid service.
I switched over to MSN because of the amount of spam coming in over ICQ. Aside from that, the interface for MSN simply feels better (messages sends when you hit enter by default, simple appearance). While ICQ can be setup to do all that MSN does by default, its the fact that MSN does it by default.
END COMMUNICATION
I would kill for an unified IM system; Jabber is the best out there so far. There's a good primer at http//www.jabber.org, but basically, think of an instant e-mail; the network stays decentralized. No one controls it, there's not a single server running the show. Not only that, right now Jabber can be "bridged" onto other IM networks, so transition can be smoothed, to a degree. Your own ISP could host a Jabber server for you, with the same username as your mail, for example. Neat stuff.
The protocol is also well designed, as far as i've looked into it. I'm forced to use MSN, and i've already stumbled into the "can't block annoying kids" problem. ICQ is nice, but seems to be dying, and AOL i can't stand.
Another post talked about the "good old days" before IM fragmentation when everyone just used ICQ. In my view, the golden opportunity for everyone else to get market share was when Mirabilis failed to update ICQ so that it would work through corporate firewalls. Before long, all the kids who were crazy about IM in college graduated, found out they couldn't run ICQ through their company's corporate firewall, and moved en mass to other networks like Yahoo that had workarounds. By the time ICQ caught up, it was too late, people had already switched.
If Google is going to get their IM network to take off, it's going to take something about existing IM networks that can similarly simultaneously annoy you and all your friends into switching. I'm not sure what it's going to be, but it'll probably have to be something stronger than the lure of having everyone code their own client.
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...
... That and I find the text ads interesting and sometimes funny, but not invasive...
Plus it's Google. I like GMail, think the interface is good for what I do with it, and if they can extend that to messaging then they can start to turn the geek crowd who will then make somebody else do it and the lemming effect kicks in.
Personally, this may be enough for me to install something like it again. Right now I will NOT install MSN and will never install it because of a few personal dislikes. However, Google? That could and may be enough for many to make the move.
- Relativistic? That's barely Newtonian!
I'll just pretend GMail is actually out for this post.
It's not the same thing at all. E-mail is all interoperable. Different mail services are like different IM clients, not like different IM networks. Being one of the few users of an email provider has a certain appeal to most people. However, with an IM service, it's useless unless other people are using it too.
It would perhaps remove many people's need to have a Hotmail address purely to be able to use MSN Messenger. Less people tied to Hotmail would probably mean more customers for GMail.
I for one would much prefer to use my own Jabber server to be able to chat directly with someone@gmail.com. Yay for open protocols and inter-server links. At the moment I only use it for work stuff.
Imagine being "always available" and if you are not at your IM it would go and stay in your GMAIL account right now.
gShares.net
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artlu.net
Google seems to be progressing from a deskbar (toolbar.google.com/deskbar/) to email (gmail.google.com), email with a desktop email alert (toolbar.google.com/gmail-helper/index.html) and hopefully a instant messenging client. Integrating web search, searable archived queries, searchable IM archiving, relevant text ads, and that 1Gb of email storage with an integrated single sign on is an interesting possabillity. IMHO I think that is google's overall strategy, and they are just parting out to us individual components of what will eventally an integrated ad delivery system. The question is really whether they can design everything so well, that people would put up with ads. I currently have gmail and I don't mind the ads, if anything they are humorous (and yes, I'm away of other free 1GB emails like mail.walla.com etc.). What do you think?
This would be like tape-recording all your spoken conversations. What do you need to search your IM conversations for ? "Hey, you called me this-and-that on January 24th, 2005 11:23:11, don't deny it ! I got proof !" Yeah. Great. Well... perhaps not.
It's already more than enough that I can find all the shit I wrote on usenet ten years ago when I was young and foolish on Google groups as well as my old, for me long inaccessible homepages from 94/95 on Google. If Microsoft tried this, everyone would be up in arms, but because it is Google it would be oh so cool.
What genius it would be to lure the masses into the ultimate information trap.
The trapdoor slams when they have everything they need to control you... the Walmart of the web.
I'm not saying its going to happen. However, us paranoid (for medicinal purposes, of course) civilians have our eyes peeled.
I never really heard about identity theft on ICQ - never really looked into it.... but that explains why I lost my really low UID there... The username and password were just different all of a sudden one day.
I did signup for a new one but never told anyone I knew about it, so essentially I didn't use ICQ anymore.
-N
I've nothing to say here...
Why is google the right company to do this?
Simple put, they have the most to gain. Perhaphs you should read this blog about how google probably will move into areas that give them a) more eyes to show context relevant ads or [more importantly] b) move into areas that give them insight into what people are interested (IM's would be relevant here) or areas that give them information on where and what we spend out money (this includes being a go-between for the client and a merchant, or merchant and bank).
So you see... with googles software expertiese in making things easy to use, (and simple at the same time) they could make people *want* to switch to their IM client, while gaining valuable insight at the same time
It's all about driving the add revenue, and for google that means giving more relevant ads (which advertisers pay more for).
It depends of course on how well Google's client will measure up:
- It better have a 'G' in front of the name... instant street cred.
- They will probably get the user interface right like they have in the past: lightweight, intuitive, attractive, instead of the bloated, confusing and fugly interface of ICQ.
- I wonder if they will allow other clients to connect... not so much to replace the Google client, but to allow people to develop clients for platforms they might not have thought of... oddball operating systems, PDA's, mobile phones, or even Perl scripts running on webservers. People have done all this with ICQ and MSN, but it is really tiring to try and keep up with ever-changing protocols and operators trying to lock you out.
- Oh and Google... please please please include off-line messaging like ICQ, instead of diverting to email. I want ONE client on which to receive messages, offine or online.
Personally, I think the world has been waiting for IM done right. Google is large and clever enough to provide enough initial momentum to their IM effort, and they have a good track record when it comes to usability.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Google can leverage its search technology by logging "public" IM conversations and making them indexable. Users can pick if they want their chat room/IM conversation public and have everything indexed.
You could do an interview with someone, and have it captured and indexed. Or the IETF could hold a committe meetting in a public chat room, knowing that there is an instant public archive.
Someone searching might find a snippet of a conversation. From there, Google could provide the full thread by moving backwards or forwards from the snippet that was a hit.
Of course, most conversations would be private, but some might choose to have public discussions.
As long as it's not evil.
For one thing, they refuse to help you if your account is compromised. My UIN was stolen a few years back. The ass who took it, spent a few weeks trying to gain information about me from my contacts. The exact same thing happened to a friend of mine a few days before me, and neither of us can even get so much as a response from anyone at AOL. At the time my UIN was listed on some Russian page offering stolen UIN's for sale. You would think that would be something AOL might want to put a stop to since it only makes them look bad. If an 8 character (max they allow) alpha numeric password isn't good enough to prevent that, then at least pay attention to people when they come looking for help. And before anyone mentions the password retrieval thing - according to it, my email address was set before there was a retrieval service so it cannot be used.
I do. Or more correctly, the company I work for runs the IM client that I wrote. Why? Because we wanted to add web accessibility to our IM system, and it was nearly trivial to throw that onto our Zope server. What's the going rate for integrating MSN or Yahoo! onto a pre-existing Unix web server these days?
Yeah, I realize that this is a very atypical situation, but just because you don't know someone who's written their own client doesn't mean that noone has. There are a lot of niches where Jabber scales down brilliantly, but where the old, closed systems don't seem to scale down at all.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
...the more likely it is that someone will come up with something really cool. If you're not a programmer, you still benefit from other people having the ability to modify the code (or create their own clients, in this case).
AEIOU: open-source anonymous internet currency
But you can use 'transports' (aka gateways) on jabber servers other than the one you are registered with... eg- I use jabber.org as my primary jabber server, but connect to aim, msn, y! and icq through myjabber.net and irc through jabber.org.uk (it's the only one I've found that actually works). In other words, you don't have to use google's transports (they probably wouldn't have them anyway) to connect to the other services.
God became man to enable men to become sons of God. -C.S. Lewis
I don't know about you, but I'm not about to hand off all aspects of my life to some company-- any company; yes, even Google.
I have a little safe in my closet. I file all my paperwork in it by category, oldest stuff first. Need something? Get the key, go to the folder, pull the item.
I would want to allow a single company, which solely exists to make money off of me, to do this for me because...?
I'll be my own Big Brother, thank you.
"An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program."
I run an IM client that someone else wrote: gaim.
I think you'll find this is true of quite a lot of people. The benefit of an open protocol for most people isn't that they can write their own client, it's that they will have numerous clients to chose from and they can take their pick. With a closed system like AIM or Yahoo, you still have the unofficial clients, but you have to worry about the networks purposely breaking them every once in a while.
I mean, face it, the official AIM client is a complete and utter piece of shit (only surpassed in crappyness by the official ICQ client, which is why ICQ lost my business). I can't comment on the Yahoo client, as I've never used it, but let's just say I don't expect much. If you're still running an official client, I feel sorry for you. Unless you like adds.
The reason people will switch is because they're already running Gaim or Trillian and adding another network is just as simple as adding some contact info into a configuration dialog. Eventually people will run out reasons to use the closed networks.
If Google is going to get their IM network to take off, it's going to take something about existing IM networks that can similarly simultaneously annoy you and all your friends into switching. I'm not sure what it's going to be, but it'll probably have to be something stronger than the lure of having everyone code their own client.
Like popup advertisements? I wouldn't mind a VERY few text ads appearing in the bottom corner of my IM windows. Popup image ads, and the useless AIM Today screen (and similar, on other networks) annoy the heck out of me, and make me pine for a better alternative.
Global warming is neither science, nor politics. It is a religion.
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I use Gaim when using a Linux-based computer - with over 512mb RAM on my Windows machine, I have no problems in running MSN, Aol Messenger, and IRC with no noticable performance drop - and therefore Gaim (the Windows version) would be a poor alternative in my eyes.
For the record, I have no problems in using a Jabber-based IM, or one which supports all protocols - but the implementation must be better and accessible to the entire internet population than Gaim currently is.
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If Google wants to hock more ads, it's a good business idea. But, and I'm sure this is redundant, don't we all want fewer protocols already...
If Google is big enough to run most of the others out of existence, then Google will be in the position to dictate everything about instant messaging, and its just a matter of time before it turns into an unwanted, undesirable "control" of your messaging service. Ad pushing and maybe even a "pay for" special service might be a part sometime.