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Microsoft, Yahoo Finally Merge IM Networks

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the intarweb-communications-changed-4evr dept.

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.

1 of 299 comments (clear)

  1. How's it work? by dschuetz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I know this is probably asking a lot, but has anyone actually tried these betas and watched the traffic to see what they're doing?

    Is it as simple as adding "@yahoo" or "msn:" to your buddy names, and from there all traffic is magically routed at the server side? That is, you'd use a Yahoo protocol with your yahoo client to send a message to the yahoo server, where it'll see that the destination buddy's name starts with "msn:" and so routes it to the MSN server, where it's then sent to yoru buddy?

    'cause if it's *that* simple, then it'd be no time at all before this works its way into the other clients.