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Microsoft, Yahoo Finally Merge IM Networks

Posted by timothy on Thu Jul 13, 2006 07:29 AM
from the intarweb-communications-changed-4evr dept.
Communications IT
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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  • Solution? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 13 2006, @07:31AM (#15711754)
    A client [sourceforge.net] to communicate with them all. And it's free for almost any operating system.

    • Re:Solution? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by aymanh (892834) on Thursday July 13 2006, @07:51AM (#15711860) Journal
      The difference, however, is that you need a separate account for each protocol when using Gaim. This merge means that one Yahoo or MSN account is enough to access both networks.

      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:5, Funny)

      by ms1234 (211056) on Thursday July 13 2006, @07:51AM (#15711862)
      One client in the darkness to bind them. Lets see how fast the worms spread after this.
      • Lets see how fast the worms spread after this.

        This should slow down the propagation of worms. Suppose MSN and Yahoo have the same number of users. The space being searched has now doubled, so a worm affecting only one of the major clients (the MSN client or the Yahoo client) will need to attack double the number of users just to successfully infect the same number of users as it currently would.
        • So not yet released, original project is dead, might be in version 2.0 of gaim, no MSN support, no Windows support. Thats a sure fire OS solution to a 350 million user messaging service.

          • You Can Have Your Unstable Apps (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward
            You know, some of us don't care for all the bells and whistles that make your precious chat clients unstable and buggy. Voice & Video support? That's a sure fire way to leave a memory footprint the size of Alaska on 350 million user's computers.

            • Re:You Can Have Your Unstable Apps (Score:5, Funny)

              by mjeffers (61490) on Thursday July 13 2006, @08:27AM (#15712057) Homepage
              You know, some of us don't care for all the bells and whistles that make your precious chat clients unstable and buggy. Voice & Video support? That's a sure fire way to leave a memory footprint the size of Alaska on 350 million user's computers. ...and those grapes were sour anyway so I didn't even want them.
            • Nobody want voice. I mean, voice communication with somebody you dont see face to face?
              What an absurd concept.
              Nobody will every put that kind of stupid technology in use...

              (besides 2 billion mobile phones sold worldwide and much more landlines than there are internet connected computers. Think again moron)
                • Conceptually I like IRC, but it's way overkill for anything that I do. I've used it from time to time, but I'm not a big regular user.

                  I'd say my major use of IM systems isn't to actually communicate to people via messages but to communicate status: the ability to run my eyes down my buddy list and see exactly who's available and who's not and who's at lunch/in a meeting/whatever has changed how I work. IRC is less about having a fixed list of people and knowing their status all the time, then having a parti

  • Now can we add AIM? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fyonn (115426) <dave@slash.fyonn.net> on Thursday July 13 2006, @07:33AM (#15711761) Homepage
    I think virtually every user wants all the IM networks to interconnect and from 4 big IM networks, we've had two mergers. First AIM and ICQ interconnected and now MSN and yahoo. lets get these two big networks to talk to each other and settle all the messing about!

    dave
    • AIM is federating with Google Talk. [google.com] This can mean one of two things.

      1. Google is building some sort of stupid AIM functionality into their client.

      2. AOL will realize that staying a closed network will cause them to go the way of the dodo, and the best way to keep their users is open up an XMPP (Jabber) gateway. Not a transport mind you, a full-blown gateway that makes it transparent, allowing AOL to use their existing OSCAR protocol in-house while talking to the Jabber network.

      If this occurs, and Microsoft

        • That's more or less how I used to feel about my Jabber account. But since Google Talk has come along, I've been finding it easier to convince my friends to make the switch.

          To begin with, I had been urging my AIM-using friends to switch to the GAIM/Adium clients for a couple of years now, which was easy because the official AIM client is such a kludge. Since many of my friends use GMail anyway, once they were using a multi-protocol IM client it was easy to get them to take the extra step of signing onto

        • I thought the same thing -- "neato, but why bother when I'll never have anyone to talk to" -- until I started to see people pop up as Available on my GTalk contact list.

          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.)
    • I wouldn't call it interconnecting so much as I'd call it a hostile buy-out with intent to kill.

      ICQ's popularity was ramping up at such a speed its IM implementation looked like it might overshadow AOL's which was losing customers due to dis-satisfaction with the AIM client environment.

      ICQ still exists and was rolled into AIM. However, shortly after the buyout the dev teams were slashed (Mac team eliminated) and updates seem to have slowed to a snails pace. Most ICQ users I interacted with have all used the

  • Wow, I would have never expected that to happen (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ben there... (946946) on Thursday July 13 2006, @07:34AM (#15711766) Journal
    I wonder what it means for Gaim and Trillian.

    Or Google's Jabber client. I have a Jabber server, but I never use it. Does anyone use Jabber?
    • Open protocols are good for open source. Gaim and Adium are my prefered clients on linux and mac respectively, but I use yahoo messenger on windows, and I like *some* of the bells and whistles. I certainly enjoy the integration with Yahoo music.

      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.
    • Or Google's Jabber client. I have a Jabber server, but I never use it. Does anyone use Jabber?

      Yes. About 70% of the people on my contact list have a Jabber account, 30% use ICQ/AIM and 60% use MSN. Note: Some people have more than one, which is why the numbers do not add up to 100%.

    • I use Jabber exclusively, almost all my friends use it (to talk with the ones that don't, some Jabber servers offers transport services) and my ISP is even kind enough to offer it's own jabber servers with transport services to MSN, AIM and IRC.

      I really believe that Jabber is the best thing that happened to the IM world ever. It's only a shame that inertia alone keeps people holding on to services like AIM, MSN or even ICQ. I mean, the protocol is extremelly well thought out and the developing community is
      • I think by the time people arrive at college most of them already have accounts on one IM system or another; people aren't going to switch to the school's one if it means it becomes harder to talk to other people from home.

        When I was in school most recently, the de facto standard was AIM. I think there were some people around who used MSN, but they were thought to be fairly odd. ("What's that? It looks funny...")

        Although I really like the concept of Jabber and of lots of servers networked together and inter

  • Encryption (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Henry V .009 (518000) on Thursday July 13 2006, @07:34AM (#15711767) Journal
    Wow -- encrypting traffic "between the two companies' computers" according to the article. Would it really kill them to encrypt all messages between users?
    • How often do you need encryption on your IM conversations? Personally, I'm rarely bothered about anyone eavesdropping on me asking my sister how she is.

      It may occasionally be useful as an option, but it seems like overkill for the other 99.9% of conversations.

      • Re:Encryption (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Henry V .009 (518000) on Thursday July 13 2006, @07:49AM (#15711847) Journal
        Overkill? Oh no, my computer is working harder than it should! Look, for 99.9% of conversations, I don't care that there are legal protections keeping the government from tapping my phone without a court order. But I, and everybody else, is still damn glad that protection exists.

      • Re:Encryption (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Your "sister"? Does your wife know about this "sister"?

        And do you see the point here? Not everything legal is moral, not everything illegal is immoral. E.g., trade secrets are usually neither illegal nor immoral. Do you want your mom's secret cookie recipe to fall into the wrong hands?

        And AFIAC absolutely none of it is the government's or anyone else's business. I'd like to see encryption built into every IM and email client, even if I didn't need to use it myself. Your processor cycles and memory are being

      • Re:Encryption (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Just Some Guy (3352) <kirk+slashdot@strauser.com> on Thursday July 13 2006, @09:55AM (#15712601) Homepage Journal
        How often do you need encryption on your IM conversations?

        Always.

        Personally, I'm rarely bothered about anyone eavesdropping on me asking my sister how she is.

        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)

        by Opportunist (166417) on Thursday July 13 2006, @10:32AM (#15712818)
        To actually make encryption meaningful (and to put the data hoarding craze some governmental agencies are into these days) you have to drown them in data. If you only encrypt "sensitive" data, you're actually marking this information as "worth being snooped on", and the encryption actually serves the wrong purpose.

        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.
      • You mean the Trillian SecureIM with absolutely no verification on the key exchange (and therefore no attempt to stop a man in the middle attack)? The one that it would be trival to implement a server which kept a plain-text copy of every message invisible to both sides? If you really care about protecting your messages, use something like OTR [cypherpunks.ca], which is actually secure. According to this topic [ceruleanstudios.com], if you have Trillian Pro, there is a plug-in you can use like the gaim-otr plugin, otherwise you can use otr-proxy
      • From an end-user POV, nothing to do with open-ness, I use Messenger as all the people at work use it, and I've grown accustomed to it. That's it. If it used Jabber protocol, I'd use it, but I'd still be using the Messenger application.

        MS might possibly switch to using Jabber, but that'd cost them a lot to change things over, and then they'd want to enhance the protocol to handle some things that the MSN protocol allowed but Jabber doesn't, and then the open source community would start to shout how MS is em
  • for the Trillian [ceruleanstudios.com] engineers! Seriously Instant Messaging needs to be opened up into SOME standard. I think MSFT/YHOO just got tired of being AOL's bitch. It isn't like they care about you you know.

  • aMSN in Linux? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MMC Monster (602931) on Thursday July 13 2006, @07:43AM (#15711818)
    Anyone know how does this effects aMSN? The reason I ask is that aMSN supposedly supports video chat, which GAIM doesn't support yet (and likely won't support in 2.0.0).

    Can aMSN be used for video chat between 2 yahoo users now?

      • Re:aMSN in Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by MMC Monster (602931) on Thursday July 13 2006, @07:54AM (#15711876)
        I am implying that Gaim-vv is in the process of being merged into Gaim, but that the merger will not happen until 2.0 is released. The Gaim-vv website says that gaim-vv is dead. I don't think we should be using (unsupported) "dead" software, in case a security issue were to develop.

  • Ah Trillian! (Score:3, Informative)

    by vivin (671928) <vivin.paliath@gm a i l . com> on Thursday July 13 2006, @07:51AM (#15711861) Homepage Journal
    Before I knew about Trillian [trillian.cc], which I've been using for over four-to-five years now, this might have been big news for me. Sure I've heard a complaints about Trillian's clunky interface (IMHO, I haven't had any problems with it), but it sure does the job for me. It's much better than having three separate IM clients cluttering my machine.

    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.
    • Actually, in its current state, it does not sound like the merger will help Trillian and Gaim because they are just allowing IMs/presence announcements to pass between the networks. That is not the same as the AIM/ICQ merger where they currently use the same protocol (OSCAR). So, for now at least, multi-protocol clients will have to support both, just users will not need to login to both.

  • the companies say that the resulting user community will be the world's largest, at around 350 million accounts

    Those are the companies' numbers, but according to a survey done by another firm in June (mentioned in this Reuters article [reuters.co.uk]), the estimated unduplicated audience of Windows Live and Yahoo messengers was 43.5 million U.S. users. Perhaps Yahoo and MS are counting all Yahoo and Passport accounts? Personally I have several Yahoo accounts and only use one for IM, and I'm sure many other accounts aren't

  • 350 million? (Score:5, Funny)

    by bilbravo (763359) on Thursday July 13 2006, @08:04AM (#15711926) Homepage
    How many of those are bots? ha!

    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)

  • encrypted traffic and homeland security.. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Tominva1045 (587712) on Thursday July 13 2006, @08:17AM (#15711983)


    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.

  • How's it work? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dschuetz (10924) <slash&david,dasnet,org> on Thursday July 13 2006, @08:52AM (#15712207) Homepage
    I know this is probably asking a lot, but has anyone actually tried these betas and watched the traffic to see what they're doing?

    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.
    • This is similar to how the open standard Jabber/XMPP protocol and google talk (based on said protocol) works.

      In Jabber clients, your IM name looks a lot like an email address, so that the server knows what server to send a particular message to. So for example, if you have a jabber.org IM account, and you want to talk to someone on a Google Talk account, you can just add username@gmail.com to your buddy list (or in reverse, you can add username@jabber.org to your GTalk buddy list).

      My business runs a Jabber
  • and does it work with third party clients or just the official ones?

  • Damn Encryption (Score:3, Funny)

    by jfroot (455025) <darmok@tanagra.ca> on Thursday July 13 2006, @11:28AM (#15713177) Homepage
    homer:~$ ngrep MSG -d eth1 port 1863
    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 ;)

    • Re:annnnndddddd GAIM (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bilbravo (763359) on Thursday July 13 2006, @08:08AM (#15711944) Homepage
      Yes... everyone knows about GAIM. However, you cannot talk to an MSN user from a Yahoo! account. That's what this merger means. Nobody is saying GAIM (or Trillian, or others) didn't allow you to connect to multiple networks simultaneously before this announcement.

      This is like the 6th post I've seen saying "What about GAIM?". What about it?
      • I prefer to use GAIM, but I have the latest MSN client installed, also. I want to IM my friend on his Yahoo account, but as far as I can tell, it will only work from the MSN client, not from GAIM, unless I want to setup a Yahoo account, which I don't.

        So... what about GAIM? In other words, when will GAIM be able to use the MSN protocol to talk to Yahoo users?

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