I hope it does, as it might help XMPP take off as a federated network, and not as merely the foundation of GTalk implementation. I wish Yahoo, MSN Messenger and Skype (for IM) would do the same.
I was wondering why Adium kept saying "[email protected]" wishes to converse with you. I've been getting spammed by this for a few days now. Not sure how this prompt is being triggered, but these aren't people I normally chat with, just people in my email.
It feels a lot like logging into a yahoo account and having a dozen or so chatbots wanting to get friendly.
This email is inaccurate on one item: the Google contact actually gets the add contact request when the AIM user adds the Google contact (not when the AIM user sends the first message like the email states)
Nice to see AOL and Google collaborating on something sweet. I've been using the AIM feature on Gtalk and always wondered ... Why did Google just stop at AOL? MSN, Skype, etc (all of which who are huge).
Maybe just a thing of keeping it simple? But again, it rises the question WHY AOL ?
As a result of the AOL Time Warner merger in 2001, the FCC ordered AOL to open up its instant messagning protocol to stop blocking applications like Trillian and Adium at the time from creating an interoperable method.
In 2001, AOL represented something like 90% of the instant messaging market with its combined networks of both ICQ and AIM. Building AOL compatibility then meant a whole heck of a lot and it's taken more than a decade to get to some kind of interoperability.
I wish Skype had some sort of market share large enough to justify the FCC pushing Microsoft to do the same thing. Interoperable video calls are really important.
Who's to say it was Google who stopped? Skype actively prevents anyone else from making a client and I can easily see MS not wanting to play along with Google.
How do the mobile/web/desktop clients work that do support Skype?
I know for the desktop there is an API which needs to the official client running on the same computer.
For us MobileMe/.Mac users, the usernames are in the format user(mac.com)@aol.com, and presumably user(me.com)@aol.com. Unfortunately, not @mac.com/@me.com.
That is significantly harder. Consider a graph (as in, graph data structure) of IM users. Communicating between an AIM and an XMPP user is a single line, and even though the two nodes are on different services it's not that hard to make work. Almost by definition, both services have very similar semantics for what an IM is, and stuff like presence converged a while ago enough for interop.
Now, consider a conference. Let's say AIM_A and AIM_B wish to conference with XMPP_X and XMPP_Y. Now there's six entities; the four users I just mentioned, and the conference rooms that are supposed to be reflections of each other. Conference rooms actually have complicated protocols for creating and managing them, fundamentally. Hooking them up to each other is very non-trivial. What does it even mean at the protocol level for XMPP_X to try to kick AIM_A out of the conference? You need a lot of infrastructure to make this work, almost none of which exists because it requires both conferences to cooperate, or a lot of implementation by one side or the other to be able to directly connect to an entirely foreign network on a foreign protocol. None of which the proprietary networks are likely to do.
Without cooperation on both sides this is basically impossible.
Right, that makes sense, thank you for the explanation. I guess interopertability between the two services implied to me they could speak eachothers' protocols in entirety (at least ideally), so i pictured gtalk talking to the aim chat room via its protocol. Oh well.
BTW this has implications for google apps users since there are no usable persistent chat rooms in gtalk. Well i guess any users, but for businesses chat rooms are more useful than for casual users I think.
I still hope and wish someone working at AIM or AOL would let me know the email address associated with my AIM account for which I have forgotten the password some years ago. I've had too many accounts with too many ISP. The forgotten password procedure only works if you remember which email address is tied to the account, not if you have forgotten it too.
But now since anyone can connect to my gmail jabber address, I guess I'll keep doing without AIM and drop my stupid hope of getting in touch with a human being at AIM :-)
Might it be possible that AIM will also federate with other XMPP servers?