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Unified Instant Messaging Clients?

Posted by Cliff on from the would-this-end-the-IM-wars? dept.

Hynman writes "It's getting silly - I have 4 different types of messaging accounts: ICQ, AOL IM, MS Messenger, Hotmail and regular email clients all run on my computer at the same time, and they all have overlapping capabilities. Is there any effort out there to produce a unified messaging client, that supports all types of accounts, and will respond through the correct medium (i.e. the medium that the message is delivered in). Just plug in the account information for each medium, and it performs messaging functions of all services frome one program and one interface." This is why standards for instant messengers should be created. Something like this would be extremely useful. Comments?

2 of 272 comments (clear)

  1. Everybuddy... by rongen · · Score: 5

    This is a quote from the "Everybuddy" homepage: As of right now, Everybuddy has support for AIM, ICQ, and Yahoo! chat programs. It also has file transfer between other Everybuddy users, and planned support for file transfer to other users. You can find this at http://www.everybuddy.com/ I've tried the ICQ aspect but I suspect it's still in beat (current stable release is 0.0.6).

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  2. IETF is developing IMPP by magnus.ihse · · Score: 5

    The Internet Engineering Task Force (http://www.ietf.org) is working on an instant messaging standard, known as IMPP (Instant Messaging and Presence Protocol). The Working Group has a few Internet-Drafts available at http://www.ietf.org/html.charte rs/impp-charter.html, but no RFCs yet.

    My impression is that the design of this protocol (in opposite to e.g. ICQ) is good, and I think this will be _the_ IM protocol to use, when IETF's work is finished. AFAIK, at least Microsoft is going to use IMPP (this is the "open standard" referred to during the IM war with AOL).