Microsoft, Yahoo Finally Merge IM Networks
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Jul 13, 2006 07:29 AM
from the intarweb-communications-changed-4evr dept.
from the intarweb-communications-changed-4evr dept.
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.
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Microsoft, Yahoo Finally Merge IM Networks
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Solution? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Solution? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://aymanh.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday October 25 2006, @04:23AM)
Gaim user here by the way, I haven't tried to contact an MSN user through my Yahoo account yet, and I wonder if it is (or will be) possible.
Re:Solution? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Solution? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:You Can Have Your Unstable Apps (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Now can we add AIM? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/)
dave
Re:Now can we add AIM? (Score:4, Informative)
(http://kadin.sdf-us.org/ | Last Journal: Tuesday October 16, @01:46PM)
Since they've built the chat features into GMail, I know a lot of people who use it, particularly from work. Quite a few people I know just leave their GMail open at work in the background in a browser window, and this means that they're signed on to GTalk.
I guess this may not apply if your friends all don't use GMail for their personal email, but a lot of mine do. The person that uses Hotmail or Yahoo Mail is the exception rather than the rule, and I think this is only going to grow since I've seen a lot of recent college grads signing up for GMail (even non-techie ones), while previously they might have gone for Hotmail or Yahoo. (I think the major selling point of Gmail is actually that the namespace for email addresses isn't as exhausted as Hotmail's or Yahoo's are, meaning you have a shot of getting your real name, plus it doesn't have quite the "Internet ghetto" reputation that a Hotmail address does. Even my mother knows that a Hotmail address is the shitty basement apartment of the virtual world.)
Re:Now can we add AIM? (Score:4, Funny)
(http://nemquefor.blogspot.com/)
YOU are the weakest link. Goodbye.
Wow, I would have never expected that to happen (Score:3, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Tuesday October 17 2006, @12:18AM)
Or Google's Jabber client. I have a Jabber server, but I never use it. Does anyone use Jabber?
Re:Wow, I would have never expected that to happen (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.fishdan.com/ | Last Journal: Monday April 16 2007, @02:26PM)
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:Wow, I would have never expected that to happen (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be nice to see there be some official standards of a chat protocol.
There is: http://www.jabber.org/ [jabber.org]
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.
Yes, that is the problem. It has nothing to do with technology or standards availability.
Encryption (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Wednesday September 28 2005, @12:05PM)
Re:Encryption (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Wednesday September 28 2005, @12:05PM)
Translation to American English (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://markbyers.com/ | Last Journal: Monday July 24 2006, @12:54PM)
Americanized:
I don't care that there used to be legal protections keeping the government from tapping my phone without a court order.
Re:Encryption (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://honeypot.net/ | Last Journal: Friday April 07 2006, @09:33AM)
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.
To make is useful occasionally, you gotta use it (Score:4, Insightful)
For better security, just encrypt everything. From your flight plans for next week to the grocery list of last week. As soon as there is more to be searched than can be searched in reasonable time, snooping becomes as informative as not snooping.
You can't keep your government out of your conversation. They can muscle in, invade into your privacy and should someone cry out against it he's gonna be a commu... I mean terrorist (sorry, I'm still living in the past). So instead of withholding information, which you can't do, flood them with it.
YAY! That means less engineering... (Score:2, Insightful)
(http://sanghahost.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday March 23 2005, @08:47AM)
MS Messanger actully works? (Score:1, Funny)
aMSN in Linux? (Score:3, Interesting)
Can aMSN be used for video chat between 2 yahoo users now?
Re:aMSN in Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah Trillian! (Score:3, Informative)
(http://vivin.net/ | Last Journal: Thursday May 12 2005, @11:19AM)
The merging of networks does have its advantages for the developers of consolidated IM clients since they can now use the same protocol for two networks.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics (Score:2)
(http://aymanh.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday October 25 2006, @04:23AM)
Quoting the Reuters article:
annnnndddddd GAIM (Score:1, Informative)
Re:annnnndddddd GAIM (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://bilbravo.net/)
This is like the 6th post I've seen saying "What about GAIM?". What about it?
350 million? (Score:5, Funny)
(http://bilbravo.net/)
On a more serious note, I wonder what rules they used to deal with dupes (AFAIK, you can register for MSN with any e-mail... what about yahoo accounts? maybe I'm misinformed)
Ask Slashdot (Score:1)
(http://www.marcelo.resegue.com/)
Betcha the Mac client will lag by several years... (Score:2)
(http://www.tgeller.com/)
dude, Adium (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.solidoffice.com/)
Adium: http://adiumx.com/ [adiumx.com]
encrypted traffic and homeland security.. (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.digidroid.com/)
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.
Accounts != Users (Score:1)
Offline Messages? (Score:1)
This explains my Gaim login errors this morning. (Score:2)
(http://anti-slash.org/)
Not to mention weird connectivity issues last night with the horribly archaic Y!M for OS X.
How's it work? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.dasnet.org/)
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)
(http://www.p10link.net/plugwash/)
Wrong discussion (Score:2)
Better for MultiChat clients (Score:1)
(http://roboticat.com/robokitties/)
I think this will be better for Trillian, GAIM, Adium and the like. Right now, MSN periodically changes their protocol... just to be contrary or for whatever reason.
Trillian is up to patch "g" or something, mostly because of MSN messenger or Y! compatibility changes. Now, since they have to share a protocol, I'm willing to bet they'll be more stable.
GoogleTalk, Jabber, Gizmo and others (Score:2, Insightful)
Google Talk, Gizmo, and Jabber all communicate using the conveniently open XMPP [wikipedia.org] protocol (yes, like ATM machine, I know).
This means new networks can connect to Google Talk (and the others I believe) without having to go through the absurd process of forging inter-company relationships and the like. It also means that new networks that appear using XMPP can easily join the existing networks.
To those who claim that Google Talk is little used - I agree to some extent. MSN and remarkably enough YIM have, since the near-demise of AIM and ICQ, enjoyed significant market dominance. Since the appearance of Google Talk, I have observed many users (including my own father; hardly a technical fiend) transitioning to Gmail and Google Talk, in part because of the simple web interface. I doubt (with no evidence at all) that the actual Google Talk client is seeing wild success, but I think that many users of Gmail and probably an even greater proportion of GAIM users are connecting to the Google Talk network. Of course, these days you don't have to - you can connect to Gizmo or Jabber and communicate with Google Talk users.
Ahh, the sweet flexibility.
Damn Encryption (Score:3, Funny)
(http://www.tanagra.ca/)
interface: eth1 (10.10.10.0/255.255.255.0)
filter: ip and ( port 1863 )
match: MSG
###############
T 207.46.26.138:1863 -> 10.20.20.176:1319 [AP]
MSG strathcona@hotmail.com FunFun 141..MIME-Version: 1.0..Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8..X-MMS-IM-Format: FN=Arial; EF=; CO=0....I sure hope they don't start encrypting MSN traffic... what would I do at work during the down times
Another solution: Meebo (Score:2, Informative)
(For what it's worth, the back-end of Meebo is made up of Gaim guts.)
This is great! (Score:2)
(http://www.mobydisk.com/)
but... (Score:2)
(http://thuktun.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday April 21 2005, @11:45AM)
What about those with Yahoo! IM signins but no Yahoo! email account?
Yahoo IM in Slackware (Score:1)
(http://svgalibwindows.cjb.net/ | Last Journal: Tuesday November 01 2005, @12:22PM)
What is really important: EMOTICONS (Score:1)
(http://www.vgfort.com/)
Re:So it looks like (Score:1)
(http://gumbercules.net/)
Re:So it looks like (Score:4, Informative)
http://webmessenger.msn.com/ [msn.com]. Or Google [Yahoo Web Messenger [google.com]].
ObFirefly (Score:1)
(Last Journal: Tuesday January 30 2007, @08:29PM)
Re:You mean there's other IM clients (Score:1)
5 Looking for group [Uberkid] LFG Scholo
5 Looking for group [Noobzor] Wre is teh huntar trainr?
5 Looking for group [Randomsixty] OMG noob wrong channel
5 Looking for group [Nppbzor] ne1?
5 Looking for group [Randomsixty] Reroll ally nub.