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.

Now can we add AIM?

[fyonn]

I think virtually every user wants all the IM networks to interconnect and from 4 big IM networks, we've had two mergers. First AIM and ICQ interconnected and now MSN and yahoo. lets get these two big networks to talk to each other and settle all the messing about!

dave

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?

YAY! That means less engineering...

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

for the Trillian [ceruleanstudios.com] engineers! Seriously Instant Messaging needs to be opened up into SOME standard. I think MSFT/YHOO just got tired of being AOL's bitch. It isn't like they care about you you know.

Re:Encryption

[Henry V .009]

Overkill? Oh no, my computer is working harder than it should! Look, for 99.9% of conversations, I don't care that there are legal protections keeping the government from tapping my phone without a court order. But I, and everybody else, is still damn glad that protection exists.

Re:gaim-vv

[Timesprout]

So not yet released, original project is dead, might be in version 2.0 of gaim, no MSN support, no Windows support. Thats a sure fire OS solution to a 350 million user messaging service.

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:aMSN in Linux?

[MMC Monster]

I am implying that Gaim-vv is in the process of being merged into Gaim, but that the merger will not happen until 2.0 is released. The Gaim-vv website says that gaim-vv is dead. I don't think we should be using (unsupported) "dead" software, in case a security issue were to develop.

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/ [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.

You Can Have Your Unstable Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

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?

Re:Encryption

[Anonymous Coward]

Your "sister"? Does your wife know about this "sister"?

And do you see the point here? Not everything legal is moral, not everything illegal is immoral. E.g., trade secrets are usually neither illegal nor immoral. Do you want your mom's secret cookie recipe to fall into the wrong hands?

And AFIAC absolutely none of it is the government's or anyone else's business. I'd like to see encryption built into every IM and email client, even if I didn't need to use it myself. Your processor cycles and memory are being wasted on useless eye candy, bells, and whistles, I think encryption is a lot more important than "transparent windows" or such nonsense.

Re:Wow, I would have never expected that to happen

[GreatBunzinni]

I use Jabber exclusively, almost all my friends use it (to talk with the ones that don't, some Jabber servers offers transport services) and my ISP is even kind enough to offer it's own jabber servers with transport services to MSN, AIM and IRC.

I really believe that Jabber is the best thing that happened to the IM world ever. It's only a shame that inertia alone keeps people holding on to services like AIM, MSN or even ICQ. I mean, the protocol is extremelly well thought out and the developing community is vibrant and coming up with excellent ideas like jingle, which offers voice chat.

So why doesn't Microsoft (and other companies too) follow the example given by google and instead of rolling their own protocols (MSN keeps on altering them God knows why) contribute to the jabber standards?

To make is useful occasionally, you gotta use it

[Opportunist]

To actually make encryption meaningful (and to put the data hoarding craze some governmental agencies are into these days) you have to drown them in data. If you only encrypt "sensitive" data, you're actually marking this information as "worth being snooped on", and the encryption actually serves the wrong purpose.

For better security, just encrypt everything. From your flight plans for next week to the grocery list of last week. As soon as there is more to be searched than can be searched in reasonable time, snooping becomes as informative as not snooping.

You can't keep your government out of your conversation. They can muscle in, invade into your privacy and should someone cry out against it he's gonna be a commu... I mean terrorist (sorry, I'm still living in the past). So instead of withholding information, which you can't do, flood them with it.

GoogleTalk, Jabber, Gizmo and others

[gnoshi]

As has been (loosely) pointed out, despite the AOL/ICQ and YIM/MSN network linking, Google Talk/Jabber/Gizmo do it in a much more socially acceptable way.

Google Talk, Gizmo, and Jabber all communicate using the conveniently open XMPP [wikipedia.org] protocol (yes, like ATM machine, I know).
This means new networks can connect to Google Talk (and the others I believe) without having to go through the absurd process of forging inter-company relationships and the like. It also means that new networks that appear using XMPP can easily join the existing networks.

To those who claim that Google Talk is little used - I agree to some extent. MSN and remarkably enough YIM have, since the near-demise of AIM and ICQ, enjoyed significant market dominance. Since the appearance of Google Talk, I have observed many users (including my own father; hardly a technical fiend) transitioning to Gmail and Google Talk, in part because of the simple web interface. I doubt (with no evidence at all) that the actual Google Talk client is seeing wild success, but I think that many users of Gmail and probably an even greater proportion of GAIM users are connecting to the Google Talk network. Of course, these days you don't have to - you can connect to Gizmo or Jabber and communicate with Google Talk users.

Ahh, the sweet flexibility.

Re:Solution?

[jagilbertvt]

This will promptly drop the 350million subscribers by half, as we all have accounts on both services in order to be able to talk to all our friends.

Re:Encryption

[gbjbaanb]

From an end-user POV, nothing to do with open-ness, I use Messenger as all the people at work use it, and I've grown accustomed to it. That's it. If it used Jabber protocol, I'd use it, but I'd still be using the Messenger application.

MS might possibly switch to using Jabber, but that'd cost them a lot to change things over, and then they'd want to enhance the protocol to handle some things that the MSN protocol allowed but Jabber doesn't, and then the open source community would start to shout how MS is embracing and extending and is trying to break existing apps and would still refuse to use it, and so really there'd be no point in changing the protocol over.

Nice idea though :-)

(oh, and I use Simplite to encrypt my MSN IMs at work, it works nicely).