[JDEV] Thoughts on AOL

[Max Metral]

I don't think there's much question that that WILL happen.  The trick is
we've gotten ourselves into a place where a few BIG players that outnumber
the little ones by several orders of magnitude are aggressively trying to
grow their base and believe it's to their advantage to keep the system
closed (they might be right).  This *wasn't* the case with email.  There
were a huge number of relatively equal sized players who were annoyed that
they couldn't communicate.  So I think that leaves us with the options:

(1) Force the big guys to realize they can win with interop, either because
they have better features, or because aggregate use and user satisfcation
will go up, or some other enlightened reason.  i.e. the same reason why
stores take credit cards from all banks.

(2) Make enough little guys who play nice nice together that we add up to
more than the big guys can ignore.  This is what I would call the general
Jabber "possibility" in that this advantage is inherent in the way the
system is built.

(3) Shame them into it by making users clamor for it.

(1) is hard, especially in this climate.  They're like kids who don't want
to share their toys because they're never going to get any more toys.  (2)
takes a long time, and I think we're working hard as a community at it
already.

So I'm all in favor of pommeling them to hell and back with (3).

-----Original Message-----
From: Aaron McBride [mailto:amcbride at verbots.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2002 8:07 PM
To: jdev at jabber.org
Subject: Re: [JDEV] Thoughts on AOL



Here's something that's been bugging me for a while.  Why can't IM be like 
email?
Why can't I log into Yahoo and send a message to someone on AIM (without 
having to get an AIM account)?
Why can't I setup a server at my office that checks which of my "buddies" 
are online, and let me know?

Is it really about resources?  If so, why doesn't AOL block email from the 
outside world?
Is it really about "protecting their users from spam"?  If so, why don't 
they do something about all of the spam on ICQ?

Seriously... I'm baffled.  Maybe it all comes down to ad revenue.  If AOL, 
or MS, or Yahoo, or whoever own the standard, then they can ensure that 
they have their millions people looking at the ads that they sell.  Can we 
somehow create a situation where the protocol is standardized, but there is 
still a way for the people interested in making money to provide a client 
that is better enough that people will use it with ads?  I'm thinking of 
the Eudora model with email.

I'll shut-up now.  :)

-Aaron


>It's just that they have this crappy double standard about how people are 
>allowed to use the resources that they already offer up to the non-paying 
>public, and it seems that a lot of people here (myself included) are 
>wondering if we should respect *that* at all.
>
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