Slashdot Mirror
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.""
How do you take back something you never owned in the first place?
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
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.
The free version is good, but if you're willing to fork up $25, then the Pro version is worth it as well.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
Add Skype to the list, for there are many people who use it as an IM app. It would be great if we could unify the different protocols and have one big IM network. I, for one, hate to need different accounts here and there to be able to talk to my friends.
Global warming is a cube.
Go peer-to-peer, using each other's IP address.
To discover someone's IP address, just e-mail your contacts a special message from which their IM will update it's table of address. Polling will check whether one is available or not.
Yes, it's time to take back our IM!!!
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.
But does anybody really use IM progrmas when they could just use email?
jabber
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.
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
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.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
Wow, this article is right on the money, what with Microsoft and Yahoo announcing that they're going to link their IM networks.
We can call it...
Internet Relay Chat
It will be HUGE
Geez, all this whining about proprietary half-assed IM networks. Show people how to use irc! They can use it with GAIM or any other various GUI client. (Or text if they prefer.) It's been around for decades, anyone can run a server, there are a multitude of clients on every platform, and it's entirely open. You can transfer files, and even have stupid graphical smileys and sounds if you want (or filter them if you don't).
Seriously, if people want an "open IM network", fire up an irc server, give everyone GAIM or Google Messanger, and be done with the AOL angst.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
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...
MSN and Yahoo are cooperating
I agree that this article is kind of a mute point. Why whine about it when there's already workarounds like Trillian (which has absolutely no ads or pop-ups). Just switch to Trillian and laugh at all the people that whine about ads on other IM's like AIM.
Yes, it does, as well as logging in invisible under AIM, ICQ, and MSN
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
Gaim does invisible just fine. It's just a little cumbersome. Click Away: : Invisible (or Hidden in MSN's case).
Since not all clients supported invisible for awhile, Gaim didn't have a "set all invisble". Now they all support it, but that feature is still lacking =\
Ps. I'm using Gaim 1.5.0
-Ares
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.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Or you could just use DCC and automate the whole process.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
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.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
But you have to log in and then set invisible, you can't log in invisible.
I agree it's not that hard to remove, but I don't want to have to put up with un-installing it every time I install windows, and then it trying to sneak in a new install when I run Windows Update.
The best IM clients IMO for OS X that have Jabber support (along with practically every other network) are Adium and Proteus (both of which use GAIM).
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.
Um, Microsoft hasn't tried to keep MSN IM closed. They even released the specs for the protocol, if I remember correctly. Not only that, I've read accounts of Microsoft providing support to third-party developers using the protocol and even fixing bugs reported by those developers. They've certainly been a lot more open than any of the other IM bigwigs (Jabber excluded).
The great benefit of Jabber is the fact it is designed from the start to be extensible. IRC can be hacked to do some interesting things but at the end of the day they're just hacks and may or may not be maintainable. I can write an IRC based RSS bot without too much trouble. I can also write an RSS Jabber component. With the IRC bot I don't have a really effective way of pointing new users to it. I can have the bot mass spam everyone notifying them of its existance or just have it run a greet message when someone enters a channel it's on. Unless I use some sort of RSS bot standard, some special purpose client isn't likely to be able to find or use my RSS bot.
The RSS Jabber component on the other hand is much easier for people to work with. If they send a browse request to the server my RSS component will show up. If their client asks my RSS component how to subscribe to it, it can give instructions in a structured fashion. Since the component is already going to be using Jabber, a client set up to handle Jabber messages of different types would be able to use my component since a "standard" has already been tacitly agreed upon.
I was working on a small app that I moved into beta testing. When errors cropped up I sent error logs back to me via e-mail. This scheme worked about half the time. It turned out that roughly half of the small group I had to beta test had ISPs blocking port 25. I had seen reports about Jabber before so I figured it might be worth a look as it supported message storing if a client was offline. I wrote two clients, one on my end to stick error reports in a database and the other on the beta test side to send a very simple error report. Both ends were little Perl scripts but they worked really well. Doing the same thing over IRC would have been a complete pain in the ass.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
How do you rationalize being invisible in your chat client as not "contributing" to the "network"? This is not bittorrent swarms we're talking about here. There are times when one does not want to shut down their client, and people do not always respect the BUSY status setting, so INVISIBLE is the quickest way to get a moment (or moments) of uninterrupted work. Instant messaging can be *extremely* intrusive, and for people who use it -- reluctantly -- (like me), the invisible setting is necessary to get a moments peace without having to shut down the app.
I guess I'm in awe of your comment because it just stikes me as silly that someone would complain about people having a choice regarding their IM status..and it appears to me that you are suggesting that those who run their IM clients in invisble mode are behaving somehow "unethically" or at the very least not being "polite".
While you may say: "Well just log out and leave your client running", that too is not as convenient, because maybe I am waiting for "Mary" to sign on, but I dont want to talk to "Phil" who likes to chit-chat too much. I can't see Mary log on without being logged on myself. Hence the need for "invisible".
Should I not be able to make outgoing phone calls when the ringer is turned off on my phone?
In Europe, few have heard of AIM. MSN Messenger has something like 90% of the market. Like "the blue E" has become synonymous with the internet, MSN has become synonymous with instant messaging.
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Um, Microsoft hasn't tried to keep MSN IM closed. They even released the specs for the protocol, if I remember correctly.
If by "released" you mean to anyone willing to pay for a Microsoft Communications Protocol Program License, and then use the specs only accordingly, then why, yes. In the same vein, I also heard Microsoft released the Windows source code.
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
wrong i recently attended a microsoft conference and it seems to me they are now joining the IM communities with their latest products live communications server 20005 and live communicator