A significant instant messaging project between Google and America Online is now underway. Google and AOL plan to let their respective instant messaging features communicate. This way, someone using Google Talk could chat with an AIM user, and vice versa.
Sounded cool until I read it. To me the ultra cool IM application will be the day that I can sign in with my account of choice (Yahoo!/MSN/AOL/Jabber/etc) and talk to someone on a different account. So, I could log in to my MSN account and speak with a person on Yahoo. Today you have applications like GAIM or Trillian, where you can have multiple buddy lists from all the different networks, but you have to sign in to each of those networks to talk to your contacts. This is the same thing. You have an AOL account, you can use Google Talk to talk with AOL users; not too big a deal.
Most people don’t know that, but you can do that now using jabber and transports. Transports run server-side and users from other networks appear to your jabber client as normal contacts do, but in reality they aren’t using jabber “directly”.
Currently there are some problems with IM services like AIM/ICQ & MSN blocking well-known or activily-used Jabber servers that support transports to them. I guess Google got an agreement that they will not be blocked when using the AIM/ICQ transport. I hope that also means AOL is not going to block other Jabber servers anymore (or even better: move to jabber themselves!).
The problem with that (to me anyway) is that you send your account name and password to the Jabber server that is acting as a gateway to the other network.
AOL I think it was who claimed they were blocking Trillian because of the security implications of entering your AOL password in a 3rd party app (Trillian).
The thing of it is though that Trillian doesn’t send your password in to Cerulean, it is stored locally and sent to the AIM network to log you in. Assuming on trusts Cerulean to not have your password sent to them, you are good.
With Jabber it is different, your (AIM, ICQ, MSN, whatever) password actually goes to the Jabber server. I’m not sure I trust some random Jabber server with my ICQ password. If you have a server you know you trust, great, but the fact remains that a third party has access to your password. I refuse to use Jabber as a gateway to ICQ/AIM/MSN for that reason.
Any client that connects to Jabber network does all you want…
You can do that today. I see AIM, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, Jabber buddies whenever I log into jabber with PSI client. Been doing that for past couple years or so, and I’m curious why Google didn’t do it right from the get-go when they finally introduced google talk (since they’re using jabber protocol).
See http://psi-im.org/psi.affinix.com/
You can already do exactly what you’re describing with Jabber, just use jabber transports to connect to the obsolete networks.
I hope this “integration” google is about to do is jabber standards-compliant, because for example aim2icq and vice-versa is kinda of an ugly hack and clients have to specifically support it (and some unfortunately don’t). Also, if google is about to open their newtork to AIM, it’s about time they open it to other jabber servers…
From what I can tell this is just Google allowing people to use the Google Talk client to log into an AIM account. Is this all this really is?
From what I can tell this is just Google allowing people to use the Google Talk client to log into an AIM account. Is this all this really is?
It’s important because this is part of the ‘battle’ between Microsoft and Google.
MSN Messenger always has problems. That .NET framework it’s built on means downtime everytime. If Google can provide an almost 100% working time (and I think they can) they will have success, but not now. All PC that come with Windows come with MSN messenger too, that’s a shame.
Edited 2005-12-21 20:10
The Google Talk client for Windows is a stable, bloat-free, ad-free program. All the people I know use AIM, so I’d certainly choose Google Talk over AIM 5.9 as my AIM client, assuming it supported the “core” features. (Status messages, profiles, etc.)
I seem to have a problem, only somtimes, where GTalk notifies me that I have an e-mail, and the notification never goes away, until I close an app.
Also, If I use GTalk to get to a GMail message, it doesn’t have any options at all, except to go to the inbox, which is a pop-up function blocked by Firefox.
I don’t understand why they don’t just put GMail notifier into Gtalk, which doesn’t have this problem.
Whatever happened to efforts to standardise IM ? I remember a few years back a couple of the big players created a group to look at interoperability between their networks, but it looks to have faded away to the point where I can’t even find it through Google. Hell, at one point there was even talk of an official IM-protocol.
If any area in computing is badly in need of some good standards these days, IM has got to be it.
Yeah, and AOL was supposed to open up it’s system to other clients as a condition of the AOM TW merger.