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.

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: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.

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.

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?

dude, Adium

[zamyatin]

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

Adium: http://adiumx.com/

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.

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.