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Microsoft, Yahoo Finally Merge IM Networks
WinBreak writes "Marketwatch is reporting that, nine months after their announcement, Microsoft and Yahoo! are finally ready to roll out beta IM clients of MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger that will be able to talk to each other." The Windows Live Ideas and Yahoo! Messenger pages have more information; the companies say that the resulting user community will be the world's largest, at around 350 million accounts, and that they'll be using SSL to encrypt the traffic between the systems.
A client to communicate with them all. And it's free for almost any operating system.
> Can I use Yahoo or MSN messengers through a webpage?
http://webmessenger.msn.com/. Or Google [Yahoo Web Messenger].
Go somewhere random
Need an open source, multi-protocol IM client for Mac?
Adium: http://adiumx.com/
Head on over to http://meebo.com/ for web based I/M that hits the major networks. Great to get around company firewalls too.
The latest version, Windows Live Messenger (Beta) does. It can be a bit unreliable however.
I thought the same thing -- "neato, but why bother when I'll never have anyone to talk to" -- until I started to see people pop up as Available on my GTalk contact list.
Since they've built the chat features into GMail, I know a lot of people who use it, particularly from work. Quite a few people I know just leave their GMail open at work in the background in a browser window, and this means that they're signed on to GTalk.
I guess this may not apply if your friends all don't use GMail for their personal email, but a lot of mine do. The person that uses Hotmail or Yahoo Mail is the exception rather than the rule, and I think this is only going to grow since I've seen a lot of recent college grads signing up for GMail (even non-techie ones), while previously they might have gone for Hotmail or Yahoo. (I think the major selling point of Gmail is actually that the namespace for email addresses isn't as exhausted as Hotmail's or Yahoo's are, meaning you have a shot of getting your real name, plus it doesn't have quite the "Internet ghetto" reputation that a Hotmail address does. Even my mother knows that a Hotmail address is the shitty basement apartment of the virtual world.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
This is similar to how the open standard Jabber/XMPP protocol and google talk (based on said protocol) works.
In Jabber clients, your IM name looks a lot like an email address, so that the server knows what server to send a particular message to. So for example, if you have a jabber.org IM account, and you want to talk to someone on a Google Talk account, you can just add username@gmail.com to your buddy list (or in reverse, you can add username@jabber.org to your GTalk buddy list).
My business runs a Jabber server (wildfire), which is quite happily able to send and receive messages from Google Talk and other Jabber/XMPP servers. I find this convenient, because my email address looks exactly the same as my IM name.
It should actually be possible for the big players (Yahoo, AOL, MS) to create a backend that uses this open standard to communicate with all the other Jabber servers and Google Talk - even if they still want to use their own proprietary front end (which I would be ok with, since I would just use my personal jabber account to communicate with friends and family on those other networks). They would just need to add the ability to use email style IM names, and then assign special meaning to them (e.g. use the jabber server to server protocol when one of those IM names is encountered). From the other side, if I wanted to add an AIM account to my Jabber account, I would just need to add @aim.com (or aol.com or whatever they choose) or a hotmail.com email address, or a yahoo.com email address to my buddy list.
With all the complaining they do about people using unofficial IM clients on their networks (lost ad revenue, with added overhead to support all those users), you'd think they would welcome this kind of opportunity.
http://www.unfocus.com/