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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.

52 of 299 comments (clear)

  1. Solution? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    A client to communicate with them all. And it's free for almost any operating system.

    1. Re:Solution? by aymanh · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The difference, however, is that you need a separate account for each protocol when using Gaim. This merge means that one Yahoo or MSN account is enough to access both networks.

      Gaim user here by the way, I haven't tried to contact an MSN user through my Yahoo account yet, and I wonder if it is (or will be) possible.

      --
      python>>> q="'";s='q="%c";s=%c%s%c;print s%%(q,q,s,q)';print s%(q,q,s,q)
    2. Re:Solution? by ms1234 · · Score: 5, Funny

      One client in the darkness to bind them. Lets see how fast the worms spread after this.

    3. Re:Solution? by letxa2000 · · Score: 2, Informative
      Not me, but a lot of people do. My wife does. It's viral. She was on Gaim until enough of her friends and family wanted to talk to her via voice and/or video and Gaim wouldn't do it. So she eventually installed MS MSN. So while I agree that a lot of us would never use audio/voice over Messenger, unfortunately a lot of people do. I'm sure my wife isn't the only person that left Gaim due to it lacking those features.


    4. Re:Solution? by jagilbertvt · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This will promptly drop the 350million subscribers by half, as we all have accounts on both services in order to be able to talk to all our friends.

  2. Now can we add AIM? by fyonn · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think virtually every user wants all the IM networks to interconnect and from 4 big IM networks, we've had two mergers. First AIM and ICQ interconnected and now MSN and yahoo. lets get these two big networks to talk to each other and settle all the messing about!

    dave

    1. Re:Now can we add AIM? by tapo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      AIM is federating with Google Talk. This can mean one of two things.

      1. Google is building some sort of stupid AIM functionality into their client.

      2. AOL will realize that staying a closed network will cause them to go the way of the dodo, and the best way to keep their users is open up an XMPP (Jabber) gateway. Not a transport mind you, a full-blown gateway that makes it transparent, allowing AOL to use their existing OSCAR protocol in-house while talking to the Jabber network.

      If this occurs, and Microsoft stops being so damn obsessed with SIP/SIMPLE (which I bet is how they're communicating with Yahoo), we can finally have interoperable instant messaging.

      --
      "Joy is contagious," he said, peering into the microscope.
    2. Re:Now can we add AIM? by ChiPHeaD23 · · Score: 3, Funny

      No.

      YOU are the weakest link. Goodbye.

    3. Re:Now can we add AIM? by Niten · · Score: 2, Informative

      That's more or less how I used to feel about my Jabber account. But since Google Talk has come along, I've been finding it easier to convince my friends to make the switch.

      To begin with, I had been urging my AIM-using friends to switch to the GAIM/Adium clients for a couple of years now, which was easy because the official AIM client is such a kludge. Since many of my friends use GMail anyway, once they were using a multi-protocol IM client it was easy to get them to take the extra step of signing onto their Google Talk accounts. Some of them even started using Google Talk of their own accord.

      In the last few months, I've actually spent more time talking with my friends over Jabber than using AIM or any other protocol. The use of Jabber (especially Google Talk) within my circle of friends seems to have reached a critical mass now - even my non-technical friends are starting to use it. I can only imagine that this trend will continue.

      You're right, though: The really big news would be if AIM and MSN were to interoperate.

    4. Re:Now can we add AIM? by Kadin2048 · · Score: 3, Informative

      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."
    5. Re:Now can we add AIM? by Black.Shuck · · Score: 2, Funny

      Aha ha ha. Oh, gosh that's so f...

      Oh to Hell with it.

  3. Wow, I would have never expected that to happen by ben+there... · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I wonder what it means for Gaim and Trillian.

    Or Google's Jabber client. I have a Jabber server, but I never use it. Does anyone use Jabber?

    1. Re:Wow, I would have never expected that to happen by fishdan · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Open protocols are good for open source. Gaim and Adium are my prefered clients on linux and mac respectively, but I use yahoo messenger on windows, and I like *some* of the bells and whistles. I certainly enjoy the integration with Yahoo music.

      It would be nice to see there be some official standards of a chat protocol. The thing that is in the way of us achieving of truly open chat is the fact that the account providers think they "own" the users -- which is why they are possesive about them. Not sure how to get around that either.

      --
      Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
    2. Re:Wow, I would have never expected that to happen by smallpaul · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It would be nice to see there be some official standards of a chat protocol.

      There is: http://www.jabber.org/

      The thing that is in the way of us achieving of truly open chat is the fact that the account providers think they "own" the users -- which is why they are possesive about them.

      Yes, that is the problem. It has nothing to do with technology or standards availability.

    3. Re:Wow, I would have never expected that to happen by GreatBunzinni · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I use Jabber exclusively, almost all my friends use it (to talk with the ones that don't, some Jabber servers offers transport services) and my ISP is even kind enough to offer it's own jabber servers with transport services to MSN, AIM and IRC.

      I really believe that Jabber is the best thing that happened to the IM world ever. It's only a shame that inertia alone keeps people holding on to services like AIM, MSN or even ICQ. I mean, the protocol is extremelly well thought out and the developing community is vibrant and coming up with excellent ideas like jingle, which offers voice chat.

      So why doesn't Microsoft (and other companies too) follow the example given by google and instead of rolling their own protocols (MSN keeps on altering them God knows why) contribute to the jabber standards?

      --
      Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
  4. Encryption by Henry+V+.009 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Wow -- encrypting traffic "between the two companies' computers" according to the article. Would it really kill them to encrypt all messages between users?

    1. Re:Encryption by plumby · · Score: 2, Interesting

      How often do you need encryption on your IM conversations? Personally, I'm rarely bothered about anyone eavesdropping on me asking my sister how she is.

      It may occasionally be useful as an option, but it seems like overkill for the other 99.9% of conversations.

    2. Re:Encryption by Henry+V+.009 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Overkill? Oh no, my computer is working harder than it should! Look, for 99.9% of conversations, I don't care that there are legal protections keeping the government from tapping my phone without a court order. But I, and everybody else, is still damn glad that protection exists.

    3. Re:Encryption by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Your "sister"? Does your wife know about this "sister"?

      And do you see the point here? Not everything legal is moral, not everything illegal is immoral. E.g., trade secrets are usually neither illegal nor immoral. Do you want your mom's secret cookie recipe to fall into the wrong hands?

      And AFIAC absolutely none of it is the government's or anyone else's business. I'd like to see encryption built into every IM and email client, even if I didn't need to use it myself. Your processor cycles and memory are being wasted on useless eye candy, bells, and whistles, I think encryption is a lot more important than "transparent windows" or such nonsense.

    4. Re:Encryption by AnyoneEB · · Score: 2, Informative

      You mean the Trillian SecureIM with absolutely no verification on the key exchange (and therefore no attempt to stop a man in the middle attack)? The one that it would be trival to implement a server which kept a plain-text copy of every message invisible to both sides? If you really care about protecting your messages, use something like OTR, which is actually secure. According to this topic, if you have Trillian Pro, there is a plug-in you can use like the gaim-otr plugin, otherwise you can use otr-proxy with any AIM client. Personally, I use gaim-encryption more, but that, of course, is gaim-only.

      --
      Centralization breaks the internet.
    5. Re:Encryption by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 4, Interesting
      How often do you need encryption on your IM conversations?

      Always.

      Personally, I'm rarely bothered about anyone eavesdropping on me asking my sister how she is.

      Here's the thing: if you pass plaintext traffic 99.9% of the time, it's going to look awfully suspicious when you encrypt that remaining 0.1%. Maybe you're only asking your coworker what kind of beer to buy for that party you're having and don't want the nosy network admin reading about it (or insert other innocent use here), but suddenly your messages stick out like a sore thumb.

      Encrypt your traffic whenever possible even if you don't need it. If and when you actually do need it, you'll be glad you did.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    6. Re:Encryption by gbjbaanb · · Score: 2, Insightful

      From an end-user POV, nothing to do with open-ness, I use Messenger as all the people at work use it, and I've grown accustomed to it. That's it. If it used Jabber protocol, I'd use it, but I'd still be using the Messenger application.

      MS might possibly switch to using Jabber, but that'd cost them a lot to change things over, and then they'd want to enhance the protocol to handle some things that the MSN protocol allowed but Jabber doesn't, and then the open source community would start to shout how MS is embracing and extending and is trying to break existing apps and would still refuse to use it, and so really there'd be no point in changing the protocol over.

      Nice idea though :-)

      (oh, and I use Simplite to encrypt my MSN IMs at work, it works nicely).

  5. YAY! That means less engineering... by i_want_you_to_throw_ · · Score: 2, Insightful

    for the Trillian engineers! Seriously Instant Messaging needs to be opened up into SOME standard. I think MSFT/YHOO just got tired of being AOL's bitch. It isn't like they care about you you know.

  6. aMSN in Linux? by MMC+Monster · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Anyone know how does this effects aMSN? The reason I ask is that aMSN supposedly supports video chat, which GAIM doesn't support yet (and likely won't support in 2.0.0).

    Can aMSN be used for video chat between 2 yahoo users now?

    --
    Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
    1. Re:aMSN in Linux? by MMC+Monster · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I am implying that Gaim-vv is in the process of being merged into Gaim, but that the merger will not happen until 2.0 is released. The Gaim-vv website says that gaim-vv is dead. I don't think we should be using (unsupported) "dead" software, in case a security issue were to develop.

      --
      Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
  7. Re:gaim-vv by Timesprout · · Score: 3, Insightful

    So not yet released, original project is dead, might be in version 2.0 of gaim, no MSN support, no Windows support. Thats a sure fire OS solution to a 350 million user messaging service.

    --
    Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
    What truth?
    There is no dupe
  8. Ah Trillian! by vivin · · Score: 2, Informative

    Before I knew about Trillian, which I've been using for over four-to-five years now, this might have been big news for me. Sure I've heard a complaints about Trillian's clunky interface (IMHO, I haven't had any problems with it), but it sure does the job for me. It's much better than having three separate IM clients cluttering my machine.

    The merging of networks does have its advantages for the developers of consolidated IM clients since they can now use the same protocol for two networks.

    --
    Vivin Suresh Paliath
    http://vivin.net

    I like
    1. Re:Ah Trillian! by AnyoneEB · · Score: 2, Informative

      Actually, in its current state, it does not sound like the merger will help Trillian and Gaim because they are just allowing IMs/presence announcements to pass between the networks. That is not the same as the AIM/ICQ merger where they currently use the same protocol (OSCAR). So, for now at least, multi-protocol clients will have to support both, just users will not need to login to both.

      --
      Centralization breaks the internet.
  9. You Can Have Your Unstable Apps by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You know, some of us don't care for all the bells and whistles that make your precious chat clients unstable and buggy. Voice & Video support? That's a sure fire way to leave a memory footprint the size of Alaska on 350 million user's computers.

    1. Re:You Can Have Your Unstable Apps by mjeffers · · Score: 5, Funny

      You know, some of us don't care for all the bells and whistles that make your precious chat clients unstable and buggy. Voice & Video support? That's a sure fire way to leave a memory footprint the size of Alaska on 350 million user's computers. ...and those grapes were sour anyway so I didn't even want them.

    2. Re:You Can Have Your Unstable Apps by Kadin2048 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Conceptually I like IRC, but it's way overkill for anything that I do. I've used it from time to time, but I'm not a big regular user.

      I'd say my major use of IM systems isn't to actually communicate to people via messages but to communicate status: the ability to run my eyes down my buddy list and see exactly who's available and who's not and who's at lunch/in a meeting/whatever has changed how I work. IRC is less about having a fixed list of people and knowing their status all the time, then having a particular "place" (channel) and letting people come and go. Although you could probably emulate an IM buddy list by telling everyone to go sit in the same IRC channel (and IM networks sometimes try to emulate chat rooms), they're fundamentally different approaches to communication.

      But anyway, the IRC network model is a pretty neat one (lots of local servers linked together to form networks, very few centralized points of failure, direct connections for file transfer rather than pushing them through the network) and I think it's too bad in some ways that IM arose from centralized models that lend themselves to corporate fiefdoms. I find Jabber pretty neat because of the ways you can link servers, and communicate from one server to another -- perhaps less like IRC than email -- but I think it'll be a long time before we see the demise of the big AIM/MSN/Yahoo/ICQ networks, even if at some point in the far future they're seen as nothing but a quirk of the early development of the Internet.

      --
      "Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
  10. Translation to American English by MarkByers · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't care that there are legal protections keeping the government from tapping my phone without a court order.

    Americanized:

    I don't care that there used to be legal protections keeping the government from tapping my phone without a court order.

    --
    I'll probably be modded down for this...
  11. Re:So it looks like by bheer · · Score: 4, Informative

    > Can I use Yahoo or MSN messengers through a webpage?

    http://webmessenger.msn.com/. Or Google [Yahoo Web Messenger].

    --
    Go somewhere random
  12. 350 million? by bilbravo · · Score: 5, Funny

    How many of those are bots? ha!

    On a more serious note, I wonder what rules they used to deal with dupes (AFAIK, you can register for MSN with any e-mail... what about yahoo accounts? maybe I'm misinformed)

    --
    Starmen.net
  13. Re:annnnndddddd GAIM by bilbravo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yes... everyone knows about GAIM. However, you cannot talk to an MSN user from a Yahoo! account. That's what this merger means. Nobody is saying GAIM (or Trillian, or others) didn't allow you to connect to multiple networks simultaneously before this announcement.

    This is like the 6th post I've seen saying "What about GAIM?". What about it?

    --
    Starmen.net
  14. encrypted traffic and homeland security.. by Tominva1045 · · Score: 4, Interesting



    If they don't encrypt the traffic between users then they will have plausible deniability about participating in e-tapping users for things like homeland security or marketing data mining.

    On the other hand, if they encrypt the communications they could be asked to actively provide access to the communications of others- opening them up to lawsuits galore.

    Lastly, if the communication between clients were open then logs of them could be processed, useful data harvested, and sold to marketers. But if the data were encrypted then the marketees would have a pretty good idea where their data was compromised.

    It's not personal, just business.

    --
    Cogito Ergo Sum
  15. dude, Adium by zamyatin · · Score: 5, Informative

    Need an open source, multi-protocol IM client for Mac?

    Adium: http://adiumx.com/

  16. Re:So it looks like by witherstaff · · Score: 3, Informative

    Head on over to http://meebo.com/ for web based I/M that hits the major networks. Great to get around company firewalls too.

  17. Re:Offline Messages? by ntfoster · · Score: 3, Informative

    The latest version, Windows Live Messenger (Beta) does. It can be a bit unreliable however.

  18. Re:Ask Slashdot by MrCopilot · · Score: 2, Funny

    It will continue to apdapt and evolve until it becomes sentient, but it will still be beta, and they will call it Google ShutUp.

    --
    OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
  19. Yeah right. by imsabbel · · Score: 2, Funny

    Nobody want voice. I mean, voice communication with somebody you dont see face to face?
    What an absurd concept.
    Nobody will every put that kind of stupid technology in use...

    (besides 2 billion mobile phones sold worldwide and much more landlines than there are internet connected computers. Think again moron)

    --
    HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
  20. 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.

    1. Re:How's it work? by Touvan · · Score: 3, Informative

      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/
  21. anyone know how to actually use this? by petermgreen · · Score: 2, Interesting

    and does it work with third party clients or just the official ones?

    --
    note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
  22. Here's my "what about GAIM" by norminator · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I prefer to use GAIM, but I have the latest MSN client installed, also. I want to IM my friend on his Yahoo account, but as far as I can tell, it will only work from the MSN client, not from GAIM, unless I want to setup a Yahoo account, which I don't.

    So... what about GAIM? In other words, when will GAIM be able to use the MSN protocol to talk to Yahoo users?

  23. Re:This explains my Gaim login errors this morning by denjin · · Score: 2, Informative

    http://messenger.yahoo.com/mac.php

  24. Re:universities could offer students Jabber accoun by Kadin2048 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I think by the time people arrive at college most of them already have accounts on one IM system or another; people aren't going to switch to the school's one if it means it becomes harder to talk to other people from home.

    When I was in school most recently, the de facto standard was AIM. I think there were some people around who used MSN, but they were thought to be fairly odd. ("What's that? It looks funny...")

    Although I really like the concept of Jabber and of lots of servers networked together and interoperating, I'm not sure I would have used such a service if any school I went to had offered it, unless it came with a guarantee that I'd be able to use the account forever; it's too much of a pain in the ass to tell everyone you talk to that you're changing to a new address every 2, 3 or 4 years. It was obnoxious enough with email, and in retrospect if GMail had existed when I was in school, I would have just set up an auto-forward from my assigned email to GMail and never used the school's for anything serious. Even non-geeks realize that changing a major piece of your contact information is a pain in the ass (if anything, they find it to be more of a pain than most geeks do, since most geeks know how to update their addressbook and send out new contact info, and/or have friends that do).

    I don't think there's any fundamental reason to have more than one personal instant messaging name, and there's really no benefit in tying your name to your presence at a university unless it's business-related (where it does make sense to tie it to your job role at the organization and make it go away when you're done).

    The fact that you have to change your email address when you enter and leave school is a crappy leftover from the early days of the Internet, and it's unfortunate that there isn't some DNS-like way to "re-point" email addresses at different destination mailboxes, so that your personal email address could follow you throughout your life. (Like you can now do with cell-phone numbers.) The rise of decent free email services have started to effectively provide that, and making IM names organization-specific would be a step backwards for that medium.

    --
    "Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
  25. To make is useful occasionally, you gotta use it by Opportunist · · Score: 3, Insightful

    To actually make encryption meaningful (and to put the data hoarding craze some governmental agencies are into these days) you have to drown them in data. If you only encrypt "sensitive" data, you're actually marking this information as "worth being snooped on", and the encryption actually serves the wrong purpose.

    For better security, just encrypt everything. From your flight plans for next week to the grocery list of last week. As soon as there is more to be searched than can be searched in reasonable time, snooping becomes as informative as not snooping.

    You can't keep your government out of your conversation. They can muscle in, invade into your privacy and should someone cry out against it he's gonna be a commu... I mean terrorist (sorry, I'm still living in the past). So instead of withholding information, which you can't do, flood them with it.

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  26. GoogleTalk, Jabber, Gizmo and others by gnoshi · · Score: 2, Insightful

    As has been (loosely) pointed out, despite the AOL/ICQ and YIM/MSN network linking, Google Talk/Jabber/Gizmo do it in a much more socially acceptable way.

    Google Talk, Gizmo, and Jabber all communicate using the conveniently open XMPP protocol (yes, like ATM machine, I know).
    This means new networks can connect to Google Talk (and the others I believe) without having to go through the absurd process of forging inter-company relationships and the like. It also means that new networks that appear using XMPP can easily join the existing networks.

    To those who claim that Google Talk is little used - I agree to some extent. MSN and remarkably enough YIM have, since the near-demise of AIM and ICQ, enjoyed significant market dominance. Since the appearance of Google Talk, I have observed many users (including my own father; hardly a technical fiend) transitioning to Gmail and Google Talk, in part because of the simple web interface. I doubt (with no evidence at all) that the actual Google Talk client is seeing wild success, but I think that many users of Gmail and probably an even greater proportion of GAIM users are connecting to the Google Talk network. Of course, these days you don't have to - you can connect to Gizmo or Jabber and communicate with Google Talk users.

    Ahh, the sweet flexibility.

  27. "AIM and ICQ interconnected" by lordandrei · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I wouldn't call it interconnecting so much as I'd call it a hostile buy-out with intent to kill.

    ICQ's popularity was ramping up at such a speed its IM implementation looked like it might overshadow AOL's which was losing customers due to dis-satisfaction with the AIM client environment.

    ICQ still exists and was rolled into AIM. However, shortly after the buyout the dev teams were slashed (Mac team eliminated) and updates seem to have slowed to a snails pace. Most ICQ users I interacted with have all used the merger as a prompt to migrate to AIM (AOL's assumed intent)

  28. Damn Encryption by jfroot · · Score: 2, Funny

    homer:~$ ngrep MSG -d eth1 port 1863
    interface: eth1 (10.10.10.0/255.255.255.0)
    filter: ip and ( port 1863 )
    match: MSG
    ###############
    T 207.46.26.138:1863 -> 10.20.20.176:1319 [AP]
        MSG strathcona@hotmail.com FunFun 141..MIME-Version: 1.0..Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8..X-MMS-IM-Format: FN=Arial; EF=; CO=0....I sure hope they don't start encrypting MSN traffic... what would I do at work during the down times ;)

  29. Another solution: Meebo by fritzk3 · · Score: 2, Informative
    One solution that I have found which works nicely to integrate the major IM players is Meebo (www.meebo.com). It's web-based (AJAX), so there are no voice or video options, but it does track offline messages, and can optionally keep chat histories. Also, it's a nice option for people who don't want to install an IM client (or are prohibited from doing so by corporate IT departments).

    (For what it's worth, the back-end of Meebo is made up of Gaim guts.)

    --
    All your sig are belong to us.