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AOL Adopting Jabber (XMPP)
sander writes to tell us that AOL seems to have decided to make their AIM and ICQ services compatible with XMPP. A test server is up at xmpp.oscar.aol.com, and while it's still buggy most major Jabber clients seem to work.
From the screen shots, it looks like: 798221@aol.com and bob@aol.com
No, maintaining their proprietary protocol is a completely unneeded IT expense. Now they have the power of the XMPP community behind them.
There is a lot with AIM. File transfers don't work reliably behind firewalls. There's no voice and video support. Its client is archaic. In short, their legacy of being a dial-up information provider instead of an Internet Service Provider was weighing them down.
It appears that they haven't implemented server-to-server connections yet so that's not the case now. However all they have to do is throw the switch so to speak. It would be a wonderful thing if AIM migrated fully to xmpp.
-- Ecks
I got it working in pidgin, just the usual values you would expect.
It did take a while (minutes) to connect and prompt for password though, I suspect it's being hit pretty hard.
Anything is possible given time and money.
in fact they could have the s2s server on another host/port, the correct way to know it is to look at the SRV record of _xmpp-server._tcp.aol.com which is non-existant at this time
I believe they haven't actually set up Server-to-Server connections yet, so this won't work yet. You have to use your own aol account to login to their server.
This is most likely the result of the AOL XMPP Gateway project posted in 2006 at TopCoder: http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=Static&d1=dev&d2=assembly&d3=det_aolXmppGateway
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Yes, GTalk was closed for a few months and then they opened it up for S2S. In Fact, I talk to all my friends on GTALK via S2S from personal XMPP (Jabber) server.
They are not even publishing the correct DNS SRV records yet for AOL.
> _jabber._tcp.aol.com
*** dnsserver can't find _jabber._tcp.aol.com: Non-existent domain
> _xmpp-client._tcp.aol.com
*** dnsserver can't find _xmpp-client._tcp.aol.com: Non-existent domain
> _xmpp-server._tcp.aol.com
*** dnsserver can't find _xmpp-server._tcp.aol.com: Non-existent domain
There is such a record in the case of Jabber; it uses the SRV record type. For instance:
$ host -t SRV _xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com
$ host -t SRV _xmpp-client._tcp.gmail.com
_xmpp-client._tcp.gmail.com SRV 20 0 5222 talk2.l.google.com
_xmpp-client._tcp.gmail.com SRV 20 0 5222 talk3.l.google.com
_xmpp-client._tcp.gmail.com SRV 20 0 5222 talk4.l.google.com
_xmpp-client._tcp.gmail.com SRV 5 0 5222 talk.l.google.com
_xmpp-client._tcp.gmail.com SRV 20 0 5222 talk1.l.google.com
Use example.com. That way you know you're not hurting anyone!
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
For S2S to work, they would have to add a SRV record to aol.com so other servers can find the XMPP server responsible for @aol.com addresses (this works just like MX for e-mail, but more general). I doubt they will do that until their server is a little more mature.
Try it:
$ dig SRV _xmpp-server._tcp.aol.com
It means that theverylastaoluser@aol.com (seriously, who uses it anymore?) can now IM to smartpeople@gmail.com, and vice versa.
A longer explanation: IM has, historically, been a walled garden. That is, if you have MSN Messenger (or "Windows Messenger"), I need to have MSN Messenger in order to IM you. If I have Yahoo Messenger, we can't communicate.
There are ways around this, none of them very good. You could just install Yahoo Messenger also, and AIM, and that will cover almost everyone. (Almost -- there's still Gadu-Gadu, WinPopup, Groupwise, ICQ, IRC...)
IRC is a bit better, actually, because at least there's a standard protocol. Anyone can setup an IRC server, or write their own IRC client. If you're on Windows, you can just download mIRC and connect to anyone. (I like irssi on Linux and MacIRSSI on OS X.) But it's still a walled garden, in that you can't connect to EFnet and talk to people -- in rooms or in private messages -- who are on DALnet. (Or Freenode, or...)
But not everything is a walled garden. Email, for instance -- anyone can register a domain, setup a mailserver, and provide email for themselves, for friends, or for money. If you're a poor sap who has an @aol.com email address, I don't have to do anything special to be able to send mail to you from my @gmail.com address, or from my own domain.
All it takes for email to work is a domain name and a mailserver. And a mailserver can be any computer that's online all the time. Not that I recommend doing it yourself, just saying that email is wholly and completely democratized.
Well, that's what Jabber/XMPP is all about. Not only is the chat/IM protocol open, but Jabber servers can be configured to talk to other Jabber servers -- to arbitrarily connect to each other. So you can be on AOL Instant Messenger, and I can be on Google Talk, but we can add each other to our buddy lists and communicate. Not because there's any kind of big deal with AOL and Google, but because they both speak Jabber. And like email, I can setup my own Jabber server.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
You might think their world is "little", but in my country (Greece) and I'm sure in most of Europe, everyone uses MSN almost exclusively. Noone has ever heard of AIM/Y, and only old timers remember ICQ. If you want to get a taste of what this news is like for me (apart from the obvious theoretical benefit of using an open protocol), replace the word AOL/AIM with the word MSN, to you it'd be non-news.
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