Microsoft, Yahoo Finally Merge IM Networks 299
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.
Wow, I would have never expected that to happen (Score:3, Interesting)
Or Google's Jabber client. I have a Jabber server, but I never use it. Does anyone use Jabber?
aMSN in Linux? (Score:3, Interesting)
Can aMSN be used for video chat between 2 yahoo users now?
Re:Encryption (Score:3, Interesting)
It may occasionally be useful as an option, but it seems like overkill for the other 99.9% of conversations.
Re:Wow, I would have never expected that to happen (Score:4, Interesting)
It would be nice to see there be some official standards of a chat protocol. 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. Not sure how to get around that either.
Re:Now can we add AIM? (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Google is building some sort of stupid AIM functionality into their client.
2. AOL will realize that staying a closed network will cause them to go the way of the dodo, and the best way to keep their users is open up an XMPP (Jabber) gateway. Not a transport mind you, a full-blown gateway that makes it transparent, allowing AOL to use their existing OSCAR protocol in-house while talking to the Jabber network.
If this occurs, and Microsoft stops being so damn obsessed with SIP/SIMPLE (which I bet is how they're communicating with Yahoo), we can finally have interoperable instant messaging.
encrypted traffic and homeland security.. (Score:4, Interesting)
If they don't encrypt the traffic between users then they will have plausible deniability about participating in e-tapping users for things like homeland security or marketing data mining.
On the other hand, if they encrypt the communications they could be asked to actively provide access to the communications of others- opening them up to lawsuits galore.
Lastly, if the communication between clients were open then logs of them could be processed, useful data harvested, and sold to marketers. But if the data were encrypted then the marketees would have a pretty good idea where their data was compromised.
It's not personal, just business.
How's it work? (Score:5, Interesting)
Is it as simple as adding "@yahoo" or "msn:" to your buddy names, and from there all traffic is magically routed at the server side? That is, you'd use a Yahoo protocol with your yahoo client to send a message to the yahoo server, where it'll see that the destination buddy's name starts with "msn:" and so routes it to the MSN server, where it's then sent to yoru buddy?
'cause if it's *that* simple, then it'd be no time at all before this works its way into the other clients.
anyone know how to actually use this? (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's my "what about GAIM" (Score:3, Interesting)
So... what about GAIM? In other words, when will GAIM be able to use the MSN protocol to talk to Yahoo users?
Re:You Can Have Your Unstable Apps (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd say my major use of IM systems isn't to actually communicate to people via messages but to communicate status: the ability to run my eyes down my buddy list and see exactly who's available and who's not and who's at lunch/in a meeting/whatever has changed how I work. IRC is less about having a fixed list of people and knowing their status all the time, then having a particular "place" (channel) and letting people come and go. Although you could probably emulate an IM buddy list by telling everyone to go sit in the same IRC channel (and IM networks sometimes try to emulate chat rooms), they're fundamentally different approaches to communication.
But anyway, the IRC network model is a pretty neat one (lots of local servers linked together to form networks, very few centralized points of failure, direct connections for file transfer rather than pushing them through the network) and I think it's too bad in some ways that IM arose from centralized models that lend themselves to corporate fiefdoms. I find Jabber pretty neat because of the ways you can link servers, and communicate from one server to another -- perhaps less like IRC than email -- but I think it'll be a long time before we see the demise of the big AIM/MSN/Yahoo/ICQ networks, even if at some point in the far future they're seen as nothing but a quirk of the early development of the Internet.
Re:Encryption (Score:5, Interesting)
Always.
Here's the thing: if you pass plaintext traffic 99.9% of the time, it's going to look awfully suspicious when you encrypt that remaining 0.1%. Maybe you're only asking your coworker what kind of beer to buy for that party you're having and don't want the nosy network admin reading about it (or insert other innocent use here), but suddenly your messages stick out like a sore thumb.
Encrypt your traffic whenever possible even if you don't need it. If and when you actually do need it, you'll be glad you did.
Re:universities could offer students Jabber accoun (Score:3, Interesting)
When I was in school most recently, the de facto standard was AIM. I think there were some people around who used MSN, but they were thought to be fairly odd. ("What's that? It looks funny...")
Although I really like the concept of Jabber and of lots of servers networked together and interoperating, I'm not sure I would have used such a service if any school I went to had offered it, unless it came with a guarantee that I'd be able to use the account forever; it's too much of a pain in the ass to tell everyone you talk to that you're changing to a new address every 2, 3 or 4 years. It was obnoxious enough with email, and in retrospect if GMail had existed when I was in school, I would have just set up an auto-forward from my assigned email to GMail and never used the school's for anything serious. Even non-geeks realize that changing a major piece of your contact information is a pain in the ass (if anything, they find it to be more of a pain than most geeks do, since most geeks know how to update their addressbook and send out new contact info, and/or have friends that do).
I don't think there's any fundamental reason to have more than one personal instant messaging name, and there's really no benefit in tying your name to your presence at a university unless it's business-related (where it does make sense to tie it to your job role at the organization and make it go away when you're done).
The fact that you have to change your email address when you enter and leave school is a crappy leftover from the early days of the Internet, and it's unfortunate that there isn't some DNS-like way to "re-point" email addresses at different destination mailboxes, so that your personal email address could follow you throughout your life. (Like you can now do with cell-phone numbers.) The rise of decent free email services have started to effectively provide that, and making IM names organization-specific would be a step backwards for that medium.
"AIM and ICQ interconnected" (Score:3, Interesting)
ICQ's popularity was ramping up at such a speed its IM implementation looked like it might overshadow AOL's which was losing customers due to dis-satisfaction with the AIM client environment.
ICQ still exists and was rolled into AIM. However, shortly after the buyout the dev teams were slashed (Mac team eliminated) and updates seem to have slowed to a snails pace. Most ICQ users I interacted with have all used the merger as a prompt to migrate to AIM (AOL's assumed intent)