Instant Messaging

With new tools from Microsoft, AOL and the rest

Introduction
Instant Messaging (known as IM) is, for many computer users, a killer app. It tells them when their friends or colleagues are online and allows instant communications with parties anywhere in the world, via the Internet. Advanced IM applications from Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, Apple and others sometimes add additional capabilities, such as voice and/or video communications, even application sharing features.

Major Players
The trouble is, few of the major IM apps are directly compatible. America Online (AOL) has abandoned an initiative it proposed and  submitted to the IETF in 2000. AOL now supports the SIMPLE protocol endorsed by Microsoft; it, too, has been submitted to the IETF for approval.  However, the two messaging "standards" remain incompatible. AOL in April asked the FCC to approve its proposal for a video instant messaging add-on for its service and, only a week after getting the go-ahead, began beta tests of a Video IM client.

Yahoo - Yahoo Messenger is available for both Windows and Mac. In addition to the ability to do text-and-emoticons chat sessions, can transmit video, if clients have a supported webcam or video capture device, such as a DV cam. It requires a Yahoo account.

Microsoft - As of Apr. 2003, the company offers at least four different instant messaging applications: including Windows Messenger and MSN Messenger, plus Threedegrees, a youth-oriented P2P/IM app and NetMeeting, a voice/video/application sharing application also known as "conf."

It really seems as though Microsoft is confused about its IM and browser strategy, by offering two browsers in Windows XP -- Internet Explorer and MSN Explorer -- and two very similar IM applets. Windows Messenger is the default IM client in Windows XP, while MSN Messenger (formerly referred to as ".NET Messenger") offers roughly the same capabilities on other versions of Windows. But Microsoft is pushing MSN Messenger at XP users, too. It's required to use Threedegrees (noted below), and currently offers some features that used to be available in Windows Messenger, but have since been removed. The company appears to be trying to define MSN Messenger as its consumer brand, while repositioning Windows Messenger as a corporate IM client, as can be seen by the beta product currently code-named Greenwich.

Microsoft says enterprise users can deploy Windows Messenger with Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server for enterprise-ready real communications, "protected with industry-standard security." (We refer you to our Security Alerts page to see just what that means....) It offers a special Exchange Server-enabled version of Windows Messenger for this purpose. The company insists that "Windows Messenger even works with .NET Messenger Service at the same time." We didn't find this to be true, however. We had to log out of the Windows Messenger service to log into the MSN Messenger, unless both were signed into different accounts.

Threedegrees, currently in beta, builds upon Microsoft's Messenger protocol, but adds the ability for small groups to listen to shared music playlists, throw animations up on your chat buddies' screens, and exchange photos from within a trendy-looking (but not particularly good) interface. As is the case with other Microsoft IM apps, you need a Passport account (e.g., a Hotmail address) to use it. It runs concurrently with MSN Messenger.

Read more about the product lineup, which includes clients for Windows, Mac and Pocket PC, as well as the confusingly branded "Microsoft TV" and MSN TV" platforms at http://messenger.msn.com/  There are a few third-party MSN Messenger-compatible applications, as well. The best known of these is probably Alvaro's Messenger for Linux.

ICQ - Once the best-known and most widely used Internet Messaging application, ICQ ("I seek you") has quite a colorful history. From its first press release in Nov. 1996, announcing the first beta version of its then revolutionary instant messaging app, the company formerly known as Miribilis Ltd. enjoyed remarkable success before being acquired by America Online in June 1998.  Now known as ICQ Inc., its application continues to enjoy a wide user base -- Download.com named it the first application ever to hit 200,000,000 downloads! -- but has increasingly found itself overshadowed by AOL's other IM application, AIM.

AOL appears intent on repositioning ICQ as an SMS ("simple messaging service") app; it is available in Canada for SMS messaging on the Rogers AT&T Wireless network. There are ICQ clients for a wide variety of platforms, including Mac (Classic and OS X), Pocket PC (Windows CE 2.0 or newer), Palm (Palm OS 3.1 or newer), and a wide variety of mobile phone platforms: Nokia, i-mode, WAP -- even PC-to-PC or PC-to-phone voice calls. (Charges apply for some services.) The Linux client Gabber is compatible with both ICQ and AIM (discussed below).

It's also worth mentioning ICQ's Viral Marketing approach to promotion. From Chapter 12 of the book Viral Marketing, by Emanuel Rosen: "as much as people liked the services, they wouldn't necessarily go out of their way to promote it. So they tried to make it very easy to spread the word. For example, they use the standard e-mail that will invite your friend to join, but the software can also be instructed to scan your address book and send all your friends invitation letters."

ICQ, we think, deserves some sort of award for having the ugliest home page by a major developer on the Internet.

AOL's other IM app is AOL Instant Messenger, or AIM. It is offered only on the Windows platform, although Apple offers an AOL-authorized AIM-compatible client on the Mac with iChat for Mac OS X. There are quite a few other AIM-compliant applications for various platforms, including GAIM for Linux and Trillian for Windows.

CooperatingSystems Inc. - CoSI offers an innovative (but currently proprietary) approach to P2P file sharing and instant messaging with a "preview release" of a product it calls HelloWorld. From the company's description: "HelloWorld's uniquely visual Geo Contextual User Interface brings entirely new dimensions to the experience of others online, by displaying messages, people, transfers and nodes geo-contextually. Primary connections appear onscreen as regional flags; file transfers scoot around the screen en route to their final destinations, perhaps via Nashville, Tokyo and London to Argentina, and then home. Your preferred People appear at their respective home locations, and the many other online global users are seen as twinkling lights sprinkled over the world. It's currently available for Windows only, although the company says a Mac OS X client is coming later in 2003.

Interoperability
http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/ offers a nice little free (and advert free!) program called Trillian. It effectively ties AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, and IRC into one neat little app. On the Mac, an applivation called Fire offers similar interoperability, handling AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, IRC, and Jabber messaging simultaneously.

There are a number of other popular chat and IM clients on the market. We'll look at Trillian in more depth, plus some more of the best known titles, in part two of this feature, coming soon.

Legal Skirmishes Ahead?
An AOL patent (6449344), originally filed in 1997 and granted in September of 2002, claims to cover "anything resembling a network that lets multiple IM users see when other people are present and then communicate with them."

Neowin quotes Gregory Aharonian, publisher of Internet Patent News Service, a newsletter that's critical of technology patents, as stating, "The claim is it's a system where you have a network; you have a way to monitor who's on the network; and if you want to talk to them you hook them up." Says Aharonian: "If you're doing something like that, you're potentially infringing."

Thus, we expect to see legal challenges ahead for the big IM companies (undoubtedly starting with Microsoft) and possible trouble ahead for ICQ and independents such as Jabber, Trillian, Miranda and so on.

The real wild card, however, is the project known as WASTE (apparently a reference to The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon). The project, released by AOL subsidiary Nullsoft in the last week of May 2003 under the terms of the GPL, was pulled only days later by AOL brass. But, it seems, the genie is already out of the bottle -- the app, which includes Instant Messaging, group chat, file browsing, searching, and secure file transfer features, was delivered with full source code. Almost instantly, the files began circulating on P2P file-sharing networks. Now, the company says "the posting of the Software on this website was not authorized by Nullsoft" and says "if you downloaded or otherwise obtained a copy of the Software, you acquired no lawful rights to the Software and must destroy any and all copies of the Software, including by deleting it from your computer. Any license that you may believe you acquired with the Software is void, revoked and terminated." (Slashdot has details.)

No matter what happens, Instant Messaging isn't going to disappear. Whether it evolves into a peer-to-peer service or stays server-based as it is in most of today's systems remains to be seen. ::

For Further Reading

• Technology Review: Getting AOL To Talk To MSN
• SlashDot: Will Instant Messaging Ever Unite?
• MSN.com: What's the difference between MSN and Windows Messenger?
• How to: Block MSN Messenger with a firewall.