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October 12, 2005
MSN and Yahoo! Finally Connect IM Networks: But is it too late? And Who Really Cares?
This morning there are news reports across the net that Microsoft and Yahoo! have reached a deal to interconnect their respective Instant Messaging (IM) Networks.
Back in the summer of 1999, back when the “Instant Messaging Wars” were in full swing, there was a time when even Jay Leno on the Tonight show was heard making fun of the fact that users of AOL’s instant messaging (IM) platform and Microsoft’s instant messaging platform were not able to communicate with each other. Jay wasn’t making fun of Yahoo! and MSN, it was AOL and MSN.
As far as I can tell, the only possible reason Yahoo! and MSN got together to share their networks was to create a reason for the people who were once actively using their IM services, to come back. In the six years since AOL, Yahoo! and MSN were not allowing IM traffic from each other on their respective networks, the entire IM landscape has changed. These days it is the success of Skype attracting millions of active IMers away from the “traditional” IM networks of: AOL/MSN/Yahoo!/ICQ, coupled with Jabber’s continued success in the Enterprise IM space and Google’s recent entry into the consumer IM market space that collectively eroded the market share of active IM users away from the “traditional” IM players that finally gave a reason for some of the “traditional” IM competitors to find a way to work together. This reminds me of the “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” mentality. It will be interesting to see what actions, if any, AOL now takes.
Now, over the years, it has been proven that if someone wanted to communicate with a friend on any given IM network, they could simply download the software associated with the IM network, get an account on that network, and just communicate. There never were any real barriers for anyone to maintain multiple IM accounts on the competing IM networks. Some of the more sophisticated users who felt they had a need to simultaneously communicate across multiple IM networks ended up using software solutions that included like applications Trillian and pulver.Communicator which offered the ability to communicate across the competing IM platforms. In fact, over the years, the lack of interoperability between the IM networks had become in reality, a non-issue.
Six years into the IM Wars, while the reported linking of the MSN and Yahoo! IM Networks will undoubtedly generate a lot of “earned media”, I don’t believe the news that these two companies interconnected their two IM networks together really matters all that much on its own. It is only to the extent that news of this collaboration helps drive all of the independent IM networks to one day soon empower their customers with the ability to seamlessly communicate with each other, using supported open IETF standards which in turn helps drive more people to use end-to-end IP communication services, that the news today really is a true watershed event and ends up becoming a significant milestone in the evolution of Internet Communications.
I look ahead to the time when we can all give out our IM-VoIP SIP and email URI, using a format similar to: firstname.lastname@example.com, which in the process eliminates the need to give someone a telephone number. The services (or should I say applications?) will use the SIMPLE/SIP standards to interwork, just as phone companies do today.
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Posted by jeff on October 12, 2005 07:49 AM | Permalink
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Posted by: 升降机 at July 14, 2008 05:59 AM
Good article I guess they are far to late all my friends now use / sign up for Skype for IM and talk. with the more tech savvy people using gtalk (but why can't they make the gmail account part of the sign up process here in the UK)
Posted by: Geoff at October 12, 2005 03:49 PM
Name collisions such as john.doe@example.com are indeed quite common at large e-mail providers like AOL, Google, MSN or Yahoo. The problem is easily solved by adding another indicator, such as a number. In my case for example henry1 works at several large service providers.
This problem is also known when registering for an Internet domain name that other may have already claimed. Here again, small twists are added to the desired name so as to be unique.
The main issue however is that URI's on the web, for e-mail, presence VoIP, IM, etc. are much more powerful than telephone numbers (a broken and obsolete schema owned by the legacy telephone industry) and can support the integration of Internet communications with every kind of applications. See for example the SIP events architecture.
No problem if you like phone numbers: ENUM will support the mapping of a phone number to an address of record (AOR) on the Internet and SIP will support the mapping of this address of record to as many contact addresses (CA) on the Internet, wired and wireless phones as you like.
Thanks,
Henry Sinnreich
pulver.com
Posted by: Henry Sinnreich at October 12, 2005 02:57 PM
firstname.lastname only works in small domains (and occasionally not even then).
firstname.lastname@whatever.com doesn't eliminate phone numbers as identifiers, it replaces them. How many John Smiths are there at comcast.net? You still need a unique identifier and your name certainly won't work (at least alone). So you still have to tell the person your identifier; and using firstname.lastname may actually increase the likelyhood of mis-connections based on the caller's assumption they don't have to look up/verify the identifier - they can just construct it.
Posted by: Randell Jesup at October 12, 2005 01:11 PM