It's Time To Take Back Instant Messaging

Enigma5O writes "The TechZone says the world of instant messaging is a disjointed mess, and it's time for a citizen's revolt. From the article: "The obstacles in this case are three big companies: AOL, Yahoo! and Microsoft. Each wants to keep their networks closed, thereby forcing consumers to use their brand of software and effectively using their size to eliminate competition. Five years ago, Yahoo! and Microsoft were calling for then-leader AOL/ICQ to open their network to allow others to compete. They even successfully petitioned the FCC to restrict AOL's future developments before approving the AOL/Time Warner merger. When it was convenient for their business goals, Microsoft and Yahoo! waved the interoperability flag, but now that both companies have built substantial IM communities with their own closed networks, they have lost their passion for open networks.""

Comments

Take it back from what?

[heinousjay]

How do you take back something you never owned in the first place?

Re:Take it back from what?

[NetRAVEN5000]

"Slashdotters want to see the big, bad, evil corporations put out of business, unless they pump absurd amounts of money into F/OSS projects."

No. What we want is for companies to not abandon their users. It even says in the article: "When it was convenient for their business goals, Microsoft and Yahoo! waved the interoperability flag, but now that both companies have built substantial IM communities with their own closed networks, they have lost their passion for open networks."

The point of having an IM client is to talk to your friends. I don't choose AIM, Yahoo! or MSN because of the company who owns it or how cool it looks, I choose it because my friends are on it. We have clients like Trillian, GAIM, and Kopete for a reason - we don't want to use five or six different clients just to talk to our friends simply because they're not all on AIM or Yahoo! Messenger. We just want to talk. Sure, you can download AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, Jabber, etc. for free, but why have all of them hogging up memory? And why have five different accounts, each with a different screen name and password to remember?

And, yes, we CAN create our own IM service. And we did. Just that most people still use the other ones because, as I said before, they just want to talk to their friends - they don't care what protocol they use.

"Its time to support my job security"

[dada21]

Its a big business conspiracy to become an uncompetitive monopoly. Just like GM, Ford and Dodge have a monopoly on U.S. Produced cars, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL have a complete monopoly on IM services. Just look at how much they charge for their monopoly service!

This guy is totally right. Instead of these 3 expensive monopoly services, we should instead switch to one single service that we know is far more competitive than three monopolies. It is wonderful that he's so unselfish, I'm sure the time he spends working on his company's (check the link on that tirade) software is donated.

While we're breaking down the IM monopoly, we should also tear drop the fruit monopoly that all those grocery stores have, and just grow and share fruit amongst each other in a free and open way. Come by the farm I work for, get a free orange while you peruse our other items for sale. Screw big bad grocery stores! My company gives away oranges!

There's no problem here. This guy is posing his rant in order to generate interest in his company to better secure his job. We should make every car part interoperable between manufacturers, and make every TV the same size so that everyone sees the same picture. I'm sure it won't stifle development.

Re:"Its time to support my job security"

[rvandam]

Instead of these 3 expensive monopoly services, we should instead switch to one single service that we know is far more competitive than three monopolies.

You're heading towards making a good point but it all falls apart when you start talking about cars and TVs.

We should make every car part interoperable between manufacturers, and make every TV the same size so that everyone sees the same picture. I'm sure it won't stifle development.

It doesn't matter if your car and my car are interoperable because our cars never have to communicate between each other (yet). Neither of us would benefit in anyway if it were possible for us to swap belts or hoses or mufflers or whatever.

But it does not matter when it comes to a communication platform. What if you couldn't call someone because they used AT&T and you used Sprint? What if your Nextel cellphone could only connect to other Nextel cellphones? You would clearly think that it was ridiculous. An earlier reply to your comment was on the right track about ISPs and email. But what if you couldn't email him because you could only email within your own ISP? What if you could only visit websites hosted by your ISP? What would be the point? The internet wouldn't never have developed under these kind of preposterous circumstances. But those are a much better analogy for the IM world.

Then you throw in GAIM, Trillian, and whoever else that tries to establish general connectivity and the "monopolies" fight to keep them out. Equivalent to a third party company setting up one set of phone lines to AT&T and one set to Sprint and then when you (on you're AT&T phone) want to call someone on a Sprint phone you call the third party first and they make the connection for you. Or even better, you personally get both kinds of phones and both kinds of phonelines and then have the third party come to your house and wire up a hacked connection between them. Then in the middle of the night, someone from Sprint sneaks up to your house and cuts the wires. Or else they modulate their phone signal with propietary garbage that only they know how to filter out so you still have the connection but it's useless.

Would you still fight against a citizen's revolt in a circumstance like that?

I will point out however, that what I first quoted from you above is still an important comment. Notice that in all my silly analogies I never said that Sprint and AT&T should merge (with all the other telcos) and become one gigantic conglomerate. Instead, they should still all exist (competition is good), they just all need to recognize that they would all benefit if they established general connectivity (well, all minus Trillian, etc unless you just prefer their interface).

Right now, people primarily choose to use existing IM services solely because their friends do. If they all interoperated, then we would choose them based on their quality of service (just as we ideally do with cellphones, etc). And then hopefully that quality of service would finally start to improve.

Re:"Its time to support my job security"

[ovlaski]

Or maybe we should just all agree that cars should drive on the right side of the road. Lanes should be two times the width of a horse's hind quarters and when the light is red stop. Interoperability doesn't mean the cars are the same, it means the roads and rules of the road are the same.

Re:Do away with the centralized server.

[heelios]

It's a pretty good idea, but what about people with dynamic IP addresses?

Consolidation in the IM Market

[oberondarksoul]

I think that we can expect interoperability to take a much greater role in the next few years as the number of net users with an instant messenger increases. The number of users that have an IM account today is huge; I don't think I know a single person with Internet access who doesn't.

Typically someone looking to choose a network will want what their friends (etc.) use, which poses a problem for the major networks; once somebody's entrenched within a network, it's very difficult to convince them to switch. Client 'A' may offer some new form of user picture, or so on, but the end user is unlikely to make the switch unless they can convince most of their friends to make it too.

What the networks would love is for people to make an impulse switch. If they can guarentee a user that they'll still be able to contact all their friends, as existing pan-network clients such as Trillian or Adium do today, then the likelyhood of a user making a spur of the moment choice is far greater.

IM Cliques

[vivin]

One major problem is that people tend to have their "IM Cliques". Meaning that some people (and their friends) usually have a preferred client. They usually don't want to switch over to anything else, because their friends are all on AOL/AIM/MSN/Yahoo!. One solution is like Trillian which consolidates everything into one interface. The other suggestions made by the article are good, but I still think it would be a little hard to migrate people from their "cliques" over to something new.

Re:Genuine question

[oberondarksoul]

Yes, they most certainly do. E-mail is certainly a very useful means of getting a message from A to B, but it is nowhere near as convenient as an IM, especially to teenage users who value swift feedback. It's quicker and easier to send a message to someone over Yahoo, or MSN Messenger, than it is to e-mail them, plus you can hold a conversation in almost-real time. While obviously not perfect, IM is definitely useful to many.

Closed?

[deke_kun]

They want to keep their networks closed? If that's the case theyre doing about as good a job of it as they are at securing windows. The myriad of clients that are fully functional on each of the networks is evidence to this...

Re:Trillian

[Junior J. Junior III]

Until MSN, AOL, and Yahoo! decide to close unofficial clients out, then it becomes a huge pain in the ass arms race.

Jabber/XMPP On :)

[A.K.A_Magnet]

Jabber is the way to go. It's open, scalable, distributed and simple.

The problem are social connections. People are on MSN because their friends are on MSN. Same for Yahoo!

But who from your contact list/roster, in the first place, came on MSN or Yahoo!? Well, users who were advertised by their Yahoo! account or using the MSN client being shipped with Windows. Compare to "Who made you join ICQ, or IRC". No ads, only because it was the way to go, because some computer techies back then told you it was great (well, it WAS indeed).

Slashdot crowd and others, being [...] computer and technologies aware, should be the first link in each of our own socials network to tell others to go Jabber. Non-techie people should trust us on the technical side: Jabber is way better designed than others major IMs services. The Jabber community, for now, is mainly composed of geeks and free software hobbyists. Let's tell our friends to make the switch. It's a little time consumming the first time, but it's free. Tell them to use GTalk (which should be openly federating soon, even with some restrictions to avoid 'spim'..) or any other Jabber server.

There are tons of great clients for Jabber. Under GNU/Linux, you may try Gajim, Tkabber, Gaim or Psi. Under Mac OS X, Gush, Psi or of course iChat. And for those still under Windows, Miranda, Exodus, Gaim or Psi. Google for them.

And they will soon ALL support the feature you want, just give it some time More info

Re:one word:

[afree87]

Before anyone says "Jabber has failed," you have to wait for the Google Talk developers to finish S2S support in their server. Then, some other big names might start signing on.

Re:Trillian

[vettemph]

Yep, and the same thing happened with documents, hence OpenDocument format might save the day. Unfortunatly, Microsoft is doing the same shit with the WMV format. It is closed and encrypted and only works on proprietary systems. This was sole purpose for this was to swqeeze FOSS out. Folk are making home video with webcams and don't realise that they are making "closed" movies. It's very sad that the monopolistic behavior is not being stopped.

It's your own fault!

[RAMMS EIN]

It's time to repeat my old IRC rant. IRC was there first, has long had the most features (now that voice and video is common on the alternatives, that's not really true anymore), uses a protocol that is not only open, but also an Internet RFC, and probably has more implementations than any other protocol; both clients and servers.

So, if the world had just stuck to using IRC, instead of jumping on the (at the time) overhyped, closed, and advertisement-infected instant messaging, you wouldn't have gotten this mess. As it stands, IRC is still around, and you can even use IRC to access the other networks through services like Bitlbee.

Popular software (among the intelligentsia of the net) like Gaim, Trillian, Opera and (I think) Mozilla (the suite) supports it, so you might already have a client installed.

So, no more excuses, break the proprietary chains and maybe you will be the one to write the next big popular extension. Yes, that's right. IRC is fairly easy to extend, and there are innumerable bots that do just that. You're not a proper hacker until you've written your own.

Re:It's your own fault!

[Daniel Baumgarten]

IRC and instant messaging are not the same. You should probably not use Gaim to connect to IRC, and you should probably not use Bitlbee to connect to an IM network, if you have a choice. There are exceptional cases, of course, but, like most exceptional cases, they are rare.

IM offers fancy things like formatted messages, voice chat, and buddy lists that are not handled very well by Bitlbee.

IRC offers something a little less tangible. It has tradition and culture. The IRC way has stood the test of time. The user interface, which relies primarily on commands to operate clients and interact with servers, works extremely well and has been refined meticulously throughout IRC's long lifetime. Like Usenet (no jokes now!) compared with a Web forum, the rules of etiquette are observed much more strictly on IRC than on IM services. An IRC newb who goes into #apache and says HELLO! to everyone on the channel individually will be promptly LARTed by more experienced users. Perhaps this is what makes IRC overall more pleasant to use: it is more of a community. It still offers the most important functionality found in IM, as well. I reckon this makes it better, in a sense.

Re:Trillian

[shutdown -p now]

Except that it's Windows-only, and Jabber plugin is only available in the (non-free) Pro version.

Corporate IM

[CastrTroy]

I think the biggest thing lacking with IM seems to be the lack of a corporate tool for IM. Most of them require you to route all your messages unencrypted through some server you don't own. Most of them are marketed at 13 year olds, with things such as nudges, winks, and other such annoying stuff. I think jabber could probably really make it's way into corporate networks, if they showed companies the advantage of controlling their own instant messaging. Most employers don't allow IM at all, because using available networks allows employees to talk to anyone, not just other employees, and therefore, are missing out on something that could greatly impove productivity.

Re:Corporate IM

[phillymjs]

I think the biggest thing lacking with IM seems to be the lack of a corporate tool for IM.

What are you talking about? Microsoft offers a corporate IM server called Live Communications Server. IBM offers Lotus Sametime. Apple even has one built into OS X Server 10.4. There are also other companies that offer corporate/enterprise instant messaging solutions, so the server and clients are run in-house.

~Philly

Re:Trillian

[Baloo Ursidae]

Which is why I like to use Trillian. It's pretty convenient, and you don't have to have 3 separate programs. It works well with AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and a host of other protocols/clients/whathaveyou.

But you still have to have three seperate logins to get on all the networks and if you change computers and install it on a new system, you get to resort all your contacts again. You don't have these problems on Jabber, and it lets you talk to the Obsolete Three (AIM/ICQ/Microsoft-Yahoo Messenger) networks just fine. It's also not shareware, and any time proprietary software is not involved is a great thing.

(Not to mention Trillian's got a user interface only a crackhead could love...)

Re:Trillian

[TheDauthi]

I see nothing wrong with the latter: it's software that's worth the amount they're asking, and the open alternatives aren't quite there yet. Now, just for a single plugin, no, it might not be worth it, but if they have a pro version that they are going to charge for, there must exist a line after which they begin charging. As for the former, I am running it under Wine right now. Admittedly, I'd prefer a native *nix port, but as long as I get my IM fix, I'm happy.

Re:I have an idea

[ilyaaohell]

Woah, wait. You actually WONDER why IRC stagnated while IM took off? Could it possibly be because the concept of a chat client consisting of nothing but a thin Buddy List window requiring no knowledge of "networks" or "netsplits" or "channels" was a massive leap forward in online chat applications? Could it possibly be that, more often than not, people prefer to talk one on one and not in a public chat room with a dozen or more other people? Could it possibly be because IM was the "default" chat method for everyone who signed up to AOL, the most user-plentiful internet provider of all time?

I bet you that 90% of all AIM users (which is tens of millions of people) have never once used, much less heard of, IRC... and you're suggesting that they somehow "switched" to AIM to avoid some arcane technical issue or made a conscious choice to use it over IRC?

Instant Messaging is superior to IRC in many, many ways. That, and the massive marketting of IM by a wealthy Internet conglomorate, ensured that it is now the de facto standard in online chat.

Patience

[tnk1]

Write a better IM app, with better features and interoperability, make it free. That's what needs to be done. Who cares about the Big Three? If you want a product that is free and better, you write it. Open development makes that possible. None of those three companies can keep you from creating a working, interoperable, IM app. They do have their advantages in getting an audience for it, of course, and you can't downplay that, but at the same time, many of the best things take time to for the general public to discover. If you really want to change things then what you need is code AND patience. What you don't need is to frame the issue as us vs. them. Big companies swallow up and otherwise block people that they regard as competitors, but they couldn't give a fig for a group that seems to have no designs on their turf, even if that turf will eventually be invaded by that software.

This whole issue is because people don't want to wait to have their apps be #1, so they demand that companies that actually make money off this software make their format (and therefore their audience) freely available to them to take. Say what you like about these companies, but they have put time and resources in to developing these apps. Why shouldn't they make a buck off them? Your job isn't to tell them to give in to you, it's to be better than they are, so that you don't have to be an AIM/MSN/Yahoo parasite to have widespread acceptance.

Re:Trillian

[NotBorg]

You don't get to choose what some other guy encodes his video in.

IMHO it's arguable that the other guy didn't have much of a choice. Or at least much exposure to another choice.

Wrapping it back to the original topic...

It's hard to see the little guy regardless of how great his product really is when big timers like AOL, Yahoo, MS practically beat the customer into using one of their services/products. AOL known for burying you in CDs until you join and then not letting you quit. Yahoo bundled with software that doesnt give you an option to not install it (at least you can uninstall it later). With MS you can't even uninstall their stuff.

Does jabber have to be bundled with computers to succeed? I once tried to get my mom to use another IM because it was the one I used. Largely because it wasn't bundled on her computer she didn't/couldn't.