Slashdot Mirror
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 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
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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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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.