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.

Solution?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

gaim-vv

[Anonymous Coward]

Try this out [sourceforge.net] and please stop trolling.

Ah Trillian!

[vivin]

Before I knew about Trillian [trillian.cc], which I've been using for over four-to-five years now, this might have been big news for me. Sure I've heard a complaints about Trillian's clunky interface (IMHO, I haven't had any problems with it), but it sure does the job for me. It's much better than having three separate IM clients cluttering my machine.

The merging of networks does have its advantages for the developers of consolidated IM clients since they can now use the same protocol for two networks.

Re:Ah Trillian!

[AnyoneEB]

Actually, in its current state, it does not sound like the merger will help Trillian and Gaim because they are just allowing IMs/presence announcements to pass between the networks. That is not the same as the AIM/ICQ merger where they currently use the same protocol (OSCAR). So, for now at least, multi-protocol clients will have to support both, just users will not need to login to both.

annnnndddddd GAIM

[PWNT]

360 million is nothing. Gaim communicates with yahoo and msn and 10 other protocols, and does it well. Easily surpassing 360 million users. I chose to use it because there is no advertising on it!! A nice simple interface for talking with someone. Although I would like to be able to send time-delay messages to a person. But I cannot do that with anything execpt msn beta anyways!! Keep on rocking the free world gaim. Keep on rocking.

Re:So it looks like

[bheer]

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

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

dude, Adium

[zamyatin]

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

Adium: http://adiumx.com/ [adiumx.com]

Re:So it looks like

[witherstaff]

Head on over to http://meebo.com/ [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.

Re:Encryption

[AnyoneEB]

You mean the Trillian SecureIM with absolutely no verification on the key exchange (and therefore no attempt to stop a man in the middle attack)? The one that it would be trival to implement a server which kept a plain-text copy of every message invisible to both sides? If you really care about protecting your messages, use something like OTR [cypherpunks.ca], which is actually secure. According to this topic [ceruleanstudios.com], if you have Trillian Pro, there is a plug-in you can use like the gaim-otr plugin, otherwise you can use otr-proxy with any AIM client. Personally, I use gaim-encryption more, but that, of course, is gaim-only.

Re:Now can we add AIM?

[Niten]

That's more or less how I used to feel about my Jabber account. But since Google Talk has come along, I've been finding it easier to convince my friends to make the switch.

To begin with, I had been urging my AIM-using friends to switch to the GAIM/Adium clients for a couple of years now, which was easy because the official AIM client is such a kludge. Since many of my friends use GMail anyway, once they were using a multi-protocol IM client it was easy to get them to take the extra step of signing onto their Google Talk accounts. Some of them even started using Google Talk of their own accord.

In the last few months, I've actually spent more time talking with my friends over Jabber than using AIM or any other protocol. The use of Jabber (especially Google Talk) within my circle of friends seems to have reached a critical mass now - even my non-technical friends are starting to use it. I can only imagine that this trend will continue.

You're right, though: The really big news would be if AIM and MSN were to interoperate.

Re:Solution?

[letxa2000]

Not me, but a lot of people do. My wife does. It's viral. She was on Gaim until enough of her friends and family wanted to talk to her via voice and/or video and Gaim wouldn't do it. So she eventually installed MS MSN. So while I agree that a lot of us would never use audio/voice over Messenger, unfortunately a lot of people do. I'm sure my wife isn't the only person that left Gaim due to it lacking those features.

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.)

Re:This explains my Gaim login errors this morning

[denjin]

http://messenger.yahoo.com/mac.php [yahoo.com]

Another solution: Meebo

[fritzk3]

One solution that I have found which works nicely to integrate the major IM players is Meebo (www.meebo.com). It's web-based (AJAX), so there are no voice or video options, but it does track offline messages, and can optionally keep chat histories. Also, it's a nice option for people who don't want to install an IM client (or are prohibited from doing so by corporate IT departments).

(For what it's worth, the back-end of Meebo is made up of Gaim guts.)

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 [e-mail] to your buddy list (or in reverse, you can add [e-mail] 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.