[JDEV] AIM- who needs AOL? (was Re: AOL)

[Dave]

You could actually accomplish roughly the same thing with much less effort by
writing a small bot to listen on a set of AIM screennames, using them almost
analogously to ports on an IPMasq firewall.  If an AIM user initiates a
conversation with one of the screennames being listened on, the bot reads the
first message (which would simply be a JID) to find out whom the AIM user wants
to chat with.  Once the AIM user has started a chat with a Jabber user, the bot
can keep forwarding messages from that AIM user to the same JID until the
conversation is over (which may be triggered by any number of events, including
an explicit ":done:" message, a loss of presence by either the Jabber user or
the AIM user, a sufficiently long pause, etc.).  Making this type of bot would
be substantially easier than coding a whole AIM proxy server, _and_ figuring out
how to change the AIM server in your AIM client.  Not only that, but AIM Express
and AIM QuickBuddy users would also be able to chat with Jabber users if we
employ the bot described above instead of an AIM proxy.  This solution also
allows us to stay within the AIM protocol, so if AOL decides to change the AIM
interface so that [%@] aren't accepted into text boxes asking for screennames,
we won't have to hack it to avoid rejecting those characters.

Just my two cents,
Dave Cohen


> 
> On Tue, Jan 08, 2002 at 09:07:07PM -0600, jabber at msg.net wrote:
> > Speaking of AIM, has anybody considered writing a 'reverse AIM proxy',
> > an application that would allow the AIM client to talk to what looks like an
> > AIM server, but actually just is a translator to a Jabber server? This would
> > let AIM users talk to Jabber using the same AIM client software the use today,
> > with just a change of the server name in the configuration file.
> 
> I don't know why you'd want to do this.  You'd loose support for many
> Jabber specific things and you wouldn't have control over the client.
> 
> -- 
> Jeremy Lunn
> Melbourne, Australia
> http://www.jabber.org/ - the next generation of Instant Messaging.
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