[JDEV] Thoughts on AOL

[Michael F Lin]

email (sendmail) evolved in a mostly not-for-profit academic environment,
where interoperability really was the top thing on everyone's mind. When it
matured, most of the proprietary email systems collapsed, or at least were
forced to open up (resulting in some terrible, awful addressing hacks!). IM
today is very for-profit and it is in the big IM players' interest to keep
their critical masses of users with them, so there will be only halfhearted
help from them in getting interoperable. Jabber is not yet quite to that
mature technological point that sendmail was at when it spread like
wildfire (see my Re: The Important Things for what I think still needs to
be done). But history may still yet repeat itself.

-Mike



                                                                                                                                       
                      Aaron McBride                                                                                                    
                      <amcbride at verbots        To:       jdev at jabber.org                                                               
                      .com>                    cc:                                                                                     
                      Sent by:                 Subject:  Re: [JDEV] Thoughts on AOL                                                    
                      jdev-admin at jabber                                                                                                
                      .org                                                                                                             
                                                                                                                                       
                                                                                                                                       
                      01/08/2002 08:06                                                                                                 
                      PM                                                                                                               
                      Please respond to                                                                                                
                      jdev                                                                                                             
                                                                                                                                       
                                                                                                                                       




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.
>
>_______________________________________________
>jdev mailing list
>jdev at jabber.org
>http://mailman.jabber.org/listinfo/jdev


_______________________________________________
jdev mailing list
jdev at jabber.org
http://mailman.jabber.org/listinfo/jdev