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.

makes sense to me

[orclevegam]

This seems like a reasonable move. It's not like sticking with their old protocol got them anything. They get more kudos and better interoperability with other networks by switching to a open protocol.

Very Newsworthy

[Stubtify]

Well at least for those of us who've been around long enough to remember how badly AOL fought against opening up their services. The cat and mouse games of the early 2000s with a workaround being discovered and AOL closing it are long gone at this point. It is also interesting because the internet is now starting to move into an open direction. I can remember when AOL users and AIM users could not see each other. This was done to entice people to pay for AOL service. Slowly this eroded, and AIM was able to access AOL screennames. AOL always saw its chat base as it's main way to rake people into its service. With the actual AOL business model of old all but effectively dead (I say that, but I know there are millions who still cough up for a service that is free) they had no incentive to keep things closed.

AOL's passive aggressive attention to IM

[ihatethetv]

I was introduced to IM through ICQ back before AIM existed. I remember Aim being ok, but ICQ was much better...well naturally AOL bought mirabilis for 300M-odd dollars way back when and then did the "standard operating procedure" (see the story of Netscape, Nullsoft, et al) of just letting it fester without updates while they pushed their product.

AIM was pretty much the only game in town after that for me...I had my people on AIM, and didn't see any reason to move to yahoo, let alone Msn.

Then everything seemed to stay the same for liek 5 years. The only thing AOL really seemed to be working on was adding loud video ads and fighting against the people who tried to make their crap usable -- like deadaim and it's ilk, gaim, etc.

Over the past seemingly decade, there was talk of cross-network integration...a la msn meets aim, etc. As far as I got was logging into multiple networks in gaim--which is NOT what I was hoping for.

Then google finally put out google talk, a great implementation. Easy enough for my parents to use, no ads....less spyware concern because google doesn't have an evil time warner overlord. And there's a web version of gtalk which beats the PANTs off of the aol crapfest they've called aim express. That's good for those who run different OSes or who don't want to be committed to installing software locally. To their credit aol did put out some token linux release, which i appreciated.

Call me old school but I like the TSR windows client. I don't want my IMs getting lost in browser tabs...I wish they'd port it to linux.

Anyway I read todays news as AOL is losing customers, so they're finally getting their protocol straight and using a standard.

Anyway, Google. PLEASE, please please grab AOl off of time warner...they've been dying to get rid of it, although they're too proud to admit it. Take their user base and merge it with yours. Get rid of their crap....get the media company bias out of their products...I'll take google's signature embedded ads over just about anything that's ever come out of AOL

While you're at it, take nullsoft too...and release all the source code....it might be best to release the code from before the AOL merger, btw.

Re:GTalk Compatability

[muuh-gnu]

No, this actually _is_ Jabber, while Googles AIM access isnt. Google just provides a client you can use to access AIM, but using AOL's oscar protocol. You cant use Google's AIM access with a client you choose, but here you can. The difference is that with google's approach of jsut implementing the (now old) oscar protocol, you will always have to have an actual AIM account to communicate with other AIM users. With AOL now using jabber, there is hope that they will open their servers for server2server communication, like google has done with their GTalk, so you will be able to contact aim/icq users without having an aim/icq account yourself. Like, you know, you can send email to aol users without having an aol email account yourself. Oh the beauty of open standards. I actually look forward to MSN (and/or yahoo) remaining the only ones in future _not_ using jabber as their backend, sitting in their little proprietary world and being step by step excluded from worldwide IM communication.

What about me?

[Anonymous Coward]

[e-mail] that is. That's my generic email. On systems that'll take it, though, I try to use [e-mail] since that's reserved.

Re:but......why?

[Locklin]

maybe they don't want to maintain the old protocol forever?

XMPP has well maintained, free, server software, and has the added benefit of things like jingle (voice), and a rather large user base (GTalk & Jabber). Considering all they want is for users to use their services, this should simultaneously lower their overhead and increase the value of their services.

This is yet another positive sign that arbitrary incompatibility is giving way to the (old) concept of open standards for communication on the internet.

Client only, or S2S as well?

[TFoo]

the real question is -- are they going to support XMPP S2S (server to server federation)? Currently it looks like port xmpp.oscar.aol.com:5269 is NOT accepting connections (that's the XMPP S2S port).

Without S2S, this announcement is pretty much useless -- I mean, sure I can use my jabber client against AOL instead of the AOL-branded one, but I pretty much can do that already via the reverse-engineered joscar libraries (e.g. libgaim)