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.

Comments

Closed Network no more

[PineHall]

This is big and is part of a trend. Open standards are replacing proprietary protocols. Companies are starting to see the advantage of being open and not closed. I am happy to see this.

Re:Closed Network no more

[Sancho]

There are usually some pretty good advantages to using open standard when creating your product--aside from interoperability (which lots of people think is overrated), you also get to avoid re-inventing the wheel.

Since AOL came up with their instant messaging protocol long before Jabber, it seems like the advantages are much fewer for AOL. In fact, justifying such a move to the board or to the shareholders would probably be more difficult than if they had been able to use open protocols in the first place.

Re:GTalk Compatability

[stu42j]

AIM support in GMail Chat (not the GTalk client) still uses the standard AIM protocol, not XMPP. In order to use it, you must have an AIM account. If AOL eventually fully support XMPP what that will mean is that you can use your XMPP account to chat with AIM users directly without having an AIM account yourself.

Re:GTalk Compatability

[ajs]

And as such, this is a clear admission that Google Talk was putting a serious dent in their business. They had no interest in standards until they had competition, but now that they do, they'll certainly want to make sure that their competition isn't the only one that can claim universal access (which is exactly what Google can claim now for their Web-based client).

Re:Very Newsworthy

[samkass]

Wasn't AOL/AIM also listed as one of the backers of the OpenID standard as well? So you can log into AIM using an open standard, then converse using an open standard. They now seem to be at least as open as Google about it all.

Yes, the AIM of old was very proprietary, but it seems to be "getting it" these days.

Re:but......why?

[mhall119]

I've currently got pidgin running and its talking to people over AIM...its talking to people on MSN...and its talking back into my corporate jabber network over the VPN... Yes, but you have to have an account for each and every one of those. You also can't hold a group session between your AIM friends, your MSN friends, and your co-workers, can you?

XMPP would allow you to have a jabber account on your corporate network, and talk to somebody on AIM, ICQ, or another company's japper network, without having to have accounts on those servers. Think of it like email, you have yourname@yourisp.com, and I have myname@myisp.com, but you can send me an email without signing up with myisp.com. Well now we get the same flexibility with IM. The only thing I see missing is an MX-like DNS record for IM servers.

Re:Huzzah

[Kadin2048]

Finally I will only need to be connected to one IM network. _My own_. Up to now you had to pretty much put up with either MSN logging your conversations or AOL logging them.

One of the great things about Google turning on server 2 server for GTalk is that it is now possible to run your own IM server (as you might run your own mail server) and network interconnection just works.

And then you still have AOL, MSN, or Google logging your chats, if you're talking to someone on one of their networks. If you're the only person using your chat server, it's really like just using a very complicated client program.

E.g., if you're "joe@homenetwork.net" and you run a XMPP server at messaging.homenetwork.net, but all the people you talk to are on Google or AOL, every message you send goes from your client, through messaging.homenetwork.net, and then over to Google's or AOL's servers (where presumably they log them), before going to the destination.

Unless you can convince your friends to use your chat server (messaging.homenetwork.net) rather than AOL's/Google's, you're not getting any additional privacy.

Frankly, I think privacy isn't really the goal we should be aiming for with this. If you want privacy, get OTR encryption (the easiest way is just to use Adium on the Mac), and then it doesn't matter quite so much whose servers the messages are passing through. The switch from OSCAR to XMPP is all about interoperability.

Universal SPIM for everyone!

[IGnatius T Foobar]

It's great that AOL is finally going to speak the industry-standard XMPP. Now instant messaging will be as universal as email is today. And you know what that means...

If you have a Jabber account anywhere, be prepared to start receiving lots of spim all day, every day. And don't simply think that you'll get away with not allowing buddies on your list without accepting an invitation. Spimmers don't do business that way. They simply put their advertisement in the invitation so you've already read it by the time you decline the invite.

Viagra ads, mortgage scams, pump and dump stocks ... all day, every day, but now it pops up right into the middle of your screen. Happy Happy!!

Re:Universal SPIM for everyone!

[SanityInAnarchy]

They will have to be realtime now, though.

That is -- I use a statistical filter, and I don't much care how long it takes to run, as emails are intermittent, and don't have to be delivered instantly. It's still pretty damned fast, especially for small messages...

But consider things like SPF, greylisting, and all kinds of other tricks people use for mail filtering. There are a LOT of email spam filters out there right now which simply could not work well on Jabber.

Re:great news

[JordanL]

If AOL moving to XMPP is hell freezing over... MSN moving to XMPP would be putting hell in an Einstein-Boseman state.

I other words, not bloody likely.

Re:GTalk Compatability

[Sancho]

I'd be pretty surprised if Google Talk was putting a dent in their business. It's probably one of the other big-three--Yahoo! Instant Messanger, and MSN Messenger. By moving to XMPP, AOL can effectively increase their userbase to include anyone also using XMPP (since they can now communicate with AOL's subscribers.) It's Yet Another Reason to use AOL instead of Y!IM or MSN.

XMPP's features, what am I missing?

[bconway]

I've been using AIM since 1997 and GTalk on and off for a year, both with Pidgin 2.3.1 currently.

As far as comparisons go, with AIM I can:
- See and show other's and my own idle time (critical to me)
- See other's and set my buddy profile (very useful for links and other interesting tidbits)
- See people's login time (important)
- See people's account creation time
- See the capabilities of someone's client

With XMPP I can:
- Do none of the above
- Have a slightly larger buddy icon

Am I missing something? Are these lackings limitations of Pidgin? Given XMPP's open nature, I would have imagined missing features would have been implemented long before reverse-engineering AIM's newest protocol features. :confused: