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.

Comments

Solution?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Solution?

[aymanh]

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.

Re:Solution?

[ms1234]

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

Re:Solution?

[jagilbertvt]

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.

Now can we add AIM?

[fyonn]

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

Re:Now can we add AIM?

[tapo]

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.

Re:Now can we add AIM?

[ChiPHeaD23]

No.

YOU are the weakest link. Goodbye.

Re:Now can we add AIM?

[Kadin2048]

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.)

Wow, I would have never expected that to happen

[ben there...]

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?

Re:Wow, I would have never expected that to happen

[fishdan]

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.

Re:Wow, I would have never expected that to happen

[smallpaul]

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.

Encryption

[Henry V .009]

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

Re:Encryption

[Henry V .009]

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.

Re:Encryption

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Encryption

[Just Some Guy]

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.

Re:gaim-vv

[Timesprout]

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.

Re:aMSN in Linux?

[MMC Monster]

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.

You Can Have Your Unstable Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:You Can Have Your Unstable Apps

[mjeffers]

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.

Translation to American English

[MarkByers]

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.

Re:So it looks like

[bheer]

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

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

350 million?

[bilbravo]

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)

Re:annnnndddddd GAIM

[bilbravo]

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?

encrypted traffic and homeland security..

[Tominva1045]

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.

dude, Adium

[zamyatin]

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

Adium: http://adiumx.com/

Re:So it looks like

[witherstaff]

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

Re:Offline Messages?

[ntfoster]

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

How's it work?

[dschuetz]

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.

Re:How's it work?

[Touvan]

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.

To make is useful occasionally, you gotta use it

[Opportunist]

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.

"AIM and ICQ interconnected"

[lordandrei]

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)