Instant Messengers

You've probably heard the big news roaming around blogs and news sites these past few days. Microsoft and Yahoo are cooperating to make their IM networks interoperable. Nice. Users win again. But I'm not too excited about it. Not only because i only have a few contacts on MSN (nikki, jae, hannah and her sister ate noemi), but also because i'm too much of a skeptic to believe that this is about the users, or interoperability. I think this about forming an alliance first, interop is just the means. Okay, so shoot me, and I would really glad to be wrong. MSN and Yahoo are rallying up to stand firmly and united against the IM market share giant - AOL (in the US, not here in the Philippines - we're a Yahoo country). And at the same time, this is a preemptive move against Google. Maybe they're both sick of getting kicked in their butts, they decided to join their butts together. heh.

Seriously. Google called for interoperability when it started Google talk. They freakin' used jabber protocol (xmpp) so that other clients (iChat, Gaim, Trillian, etc) can login to Google talk 's network without using the Google-developed client. Server-to-server interop was missing in the current version of Talk but their developers have stated that it is in the works so that later on, Google talk users can interact with the users of other jabber-based Networks. If you know about jabber, then you'd know that using its protocol is the way towards interoparibility. That is what's jabber is all about. For the voice part, Google has also been making headways to make it work with other clients. A month ago they hired Gaim's lead developer and this is what he said, from the Gaim news page:

I (Sean) have been hired by Google, moved to Seattle, and have been working on the Google Talk team for about a month and a half. The goal of Google Talk is to make real-time communication as open as possible, and in that regard, I've been working to offer all of Google Talk's features into other clients. Currently, I'm working on making it as easy as possible for other clients to use Google Talk's voice features. You can expect Gaim and other clients to be interoperable with Google Talk's voice features in the near future.

emphasis mine.

So here's the thing. When Yahoo and MSN joined the IM space (which was dominated by AOL/AIM then), they also called for interop with the giant, but AOL refused. So now fast forward into the present, Yahoo and MSN have both amassed their own millions of users. Do they heed their own calls for IM interoperability (and openness?) heck no. They blindly assume that Yahoo and MSN is the whole IM world and that by making their networks interoperable, they are being open. I think there's a big difference between forming an alliance and being really open.

To end, why push for an open and interoperable Instant Messenger world? Simple. So that everyone can take compatibility and lock in issues out the table and focus instead on innovating and adding features. So you don't have to use Yahoo for the reason that your friends are on the network, but because you see features on its client that are not found on other networks. Competition...: and the users win.