Musings of the Great Eric

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Microsoft and Yahoo beta-test IM interoperability

From Microsoft:

Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: “YHOO”) and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: “MSFT”) today will begin limited public beta testing of interoperability between their instant messaging (IM) services that enable users of Windows Live® Messenger, the next generation of MSN® Messenger, and Yahoo!® Messenger with Voice to connect with each other. This interoperability — the first of its kind between two distinct, global consumer IM providers — will form the world’s largest consumer IM community, approaching 350 million accounts.

Call me unimpressed.

All this succeeds in doing is creating a larger proprietary network - we’re still locked in to one client or the other, and frankly both are bloated peices of crap. (Yes, I know that there’s things like iChat, Trillian, and Gaim - but none of these are officially supported).

When they officially support IM federation via Jabber or some other open protocol, then I’ll be impressed. Choosing an IM client should be no different than choosing an email client; wake me up when we finally get to that point.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 13th, 2006 at 10:28 am by Eric and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your site.

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