Last week Meebo and Facebook teamed to launch the first integration of Facebook Connect + Chat, allowing Meebo users to chat with their Facebook friends from the popular web-based IM service. The feature has had a rocky history: Meebo used an unsanctioned method to integrate Facebook Chat in December, then temporarily disabled it at Facebook’s request. And while many were quick to point the finger at Facebook (which has had a history of bullying some third party services), as it turns out the site was eager to help Meebo, and is likely open to helping other third parties.
The announcement is the latest in a series of policy changes that indicate that instant messaging is finally starting to open up, representing a paradigm shift could potentially lead to a slew of innovations. That is, as soon as the largest remaining holdouts – Yahoo and Microsoft – follow suit.
Historically, IM has existed on closed and proprietary systems, with dedicated clients that can only connect to a single network. For many years users with accounts on multiple networks (say, AOL and MSN), would have to keep multiple programs open, which ate up system resources and cluttered desktops. By 2000 a handful of clients emerged that would allow users to manage multiple IM accounts from a single program. These stayed largely under the radar until 2002, when a client called Trillian hit 1 million downloads (and then jumped to 5 million six months later).
Prompted by the application’s growing popularity and incensed by the fact that users no longer had to use its official client, AOL attempted to block Trillian in early 2002, though the application’s developers would release patches very quickly to un-break the service. Yahoo and MSN attempted to enact similar measures against third party clients with limited success, as their restrictions were quickly cracked.
Eventually the battles between third party IM clients and the networks died down to a simmer – third-party programs would rely on open-sourced plugins to access the chat networks, and would be quickly updated if anything broke. The networks seemed to gradually accept the fact that these clients would persist, but wouldn’t do anything to help get their workarounds to function correctly (and oftentimes advanced features like file transfer didn’t).
Finally, in 2006 some chinks started to appear in IM’s armor. Google launched Gtalk, a chat client built on the open standard Jabber protocol. Meebo, a popular web-based multi protocol client, launched at around the same time, and along with other clients encouraged sites to begin opening their protocols to third parties.
Gradually AOL’s AIM network began to get in on the action, first with Open AIM 1.0 (which really wasn’t open at all, as it was primarily concerned with plugins and status updates) and later in 2008 with Open AIM 2.0. The second iteration of Open AIM offers third party web services like Meebo and native clients like Adium a sanctioned way to access the network.
More recently, the social networks have also begun to also grant access to Meebo and some other third parties, though most of them aren’t quite open (at least not yet). MySpace worked with meebo to launch support in December, and the aforementioned Facebook support was added last week.
It’s clear that progress is being made, but there are still two major holdouts: Microsoft’s Window Live Messenger (AKA MSN) and Yahoo Messenger. The two networks have teamed to let their users talk to each other, but everyone else is out of luck.
Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg says that he has reached out to both companies, but that neither of them are willing to offer a sanctioned way to access their networks. He notes that while Meebo’s integration with MSN and Yahoo are secure, he’d prefer to use the standards established by the networks themselves. A lack of ‘official’ third party access is also likely the reason why the networks have not been integrated into Gmail Chat (AIM has).
Sternberg points out the parallels between IM and SMS messaging, which has grown to become a massive market that now sees over 2 trillion messages sent per year. While SMS might seem ubiquitous now, for years major carriers didn’t support inter-network texting (you could only send messages to contacts using the same carrier). It wasn’t until these networks opened up that SMS became the norm, spurring incredible growth and widespread innovation (you can now use SMS to order pizza, look up stock prices, and get directions).
IM is also ripe for innovation, but developers have been hampered by a near-complete lack of cooperation from the major IM networks. Perhaps developers will take advantage of the growing number of networks that are open, adding new features that make them attractive to users still stuck on the old behemoths. Then Yahoo and Microsoft might be compelled to finally change – or perish.
Too little too late. Services like Twitter and Yammer are already starting to fill the void where IM has failed.
I wouldn’t exactly say IM is dead or failing. I use twitter so my friends can see what I am up to, but I use IM to discuss homework problems. I prefer IM over email and phone, so for me, it’s an essential tool.
Would you ever find IM useful enough to be used as a tutoring tool? My company has been thinking about pimping out an IM client for this use…I’d be interested in your feedback.
I think its a great idea, everyone spends an insane amount of time on IM. Its an interesting market definitely!
cooljobsalways
http://tinyurl.com/7uj5ay
At least I am on IM all the time. Yahoo, MSN but lately I am trying Digsby to integrate everything like Yahoo, MSN, Gmail, FB and Twitter all in one application.
i think IM is better for the lazy ones (just like me :p)
I do not agree this is too little too late. This is the perfect opportunity for these networks to federate, with the XMPP protocol, and utilize their existing subscriber base while extending their user’s capability to communicate with users on other networks. Google seems to be leading the way on this point.
Twitter is a good app, specially to keep up with activities
what if a caveman was on twitter?
http://twitter....om/primitiveman
its amazing…
This is so refreshing. I have always held that Open is better than Closed. You just have to find a way to make Open work. My company is doing some cool things in the higher ed. sphere with open source IM based on Jabber. Glad to see the big dogs thinking it may be time to unlock the doors.
The problem is that unlike SMS, IM doesn’t really make money for any of the providers. They use it as a way to increase stickiness. So there is very little economic incentive for them to open up.
Anjali Sen
MSN and Yahoo make tons of money on IM, which is exacty why they don’t open up since it would cannibalize their revenue
I love Twitter. I love using the clients which make them more IM-like.
But when I want to have an earnest, private conversation online, I fire up iChat. It’s faster, requires not special tags to make sure my private messages don’t accidentally end up online, and I still love iChat’s UI.
I’ve never used Meebo, and I don’t trust Facebook.
Jason, is Meebo a TC sponsor? Why are you hyping it every week?
http://trends.g...tes?q=meebo.com
Also, while I am at it: the most used IM client is probably AIM, then Skype. While doing your due dilligence, you did not mention Skype at all (it has proprietory protocol), but Meebo was mentioned multiple times.
This is true only in the US really. A variety of clients are used around the world. For instance QQ (which isn’t even mentioned) is huge in China. Yahoo and MSN basically split different regions of Europe, Latin America and Asia.
AIM and Skype are virtually non existent in Canada. It’s pretty much MSN and GTalk here.
Push Messiah, in the past four months I believe I’ve covered them twice, and one of those posts was overwhelmingly negative. And this really began as coverage of their re-introduction of Facebook Chat (widely covered elsewhere), but I decided to dig a little deeper.
So much about a lot of IMs, but nothing about Skype. I think Skype is one of the big IMs these days, too.
See my reply above. Judging by the frequency of Jason’s posts about Meebo normalized to Meebo’s size, TC and Meebo have some sort of arrangement (TC provides PR/hype for either sponsorship or some other kind of favours), but there’s obviously no arrangement between Skype/eBay and TC, because Skype does not need it.
@push – no need to troll…
@jojo – Meebo has yet to add Skype as a protocol (official or unofficial), so I imagine this is why it wasn’t discussed. I do agree that it deserved mention, as worldwide is has quite a large user-base.
I think you will start to see more of these type integrations. People want to be connected across the web and and share their info across multiple networks
Adium has been connected to Facebook chat for a while now. I use it daily.
From what I’ve been told this isn’t an ‘official’ implementation (I believe meebo used the same technology to unofficially integrate Facebook before they were asked to remove it).
perish? Yahoo Messenger (not Yahoo! Chat, as you wrongly call it) and Windows Live Msgr have hundreds of millions of users. Worldwide.
when you say they should open, I agree. But when you paint a doom picture in case they don’t, I disagree. They own the market, no matter what FB or Meebo do/say.
of course, users would find it cool to have their FB friends on their Y! Msgr/Live list of online contacts. But not having them does not mean the end of the world, especially since using an IM service is a two-ways road, where you use it because you *know* your friends/contacts also do so, giving you the opportunity of communicating.
another thing: users log on to FB to update their status and check photos and what their contacts have been up to. And they do NOT log on to keep a real-time chat. Not at all. FB is not a real-time communication platform, even if they have that “chat” thingie on the bottom of their pages.
thus, Y! and Windows Live will not perish, even if they don’t open — it would be nice if they did, though. Ah, and if they do perish, it will not be because they didn’t open to FB or Meebo, but because of the inability of their product leaders (which is a historical fact, unfortunately).
This is very true. I lived in Florida a whiles back and all my real-life friends used AIM at that time. My online friends, being a lot more international, were on MSN. I’ve moved from Trillian, to Miranda, to Pidgin, because I’ve always had to use multiple protocols.
Anyway, when I moved here to Colombia I realized EVERYONE uses MSN. And not just MSN, but everyone also uses WLM along with the MSN Plus plugin. I’ve tried converting friends to different messengers and protocols to no avail.
The worst part is when their messenger gets infected with some lame virus, they despise using Meebo or other clients so much they almost completely avoid logging on at all! There must be *something* that is attracting everyone (even some of the tech-savvier ones) to this…T_T
Oh, and everyone I know hates FB Chat too, and I only recently introduced a few to Twitter, but they are not very active with it.
“when you say they should open, I agree. But when you paint a doom picture in case they don’t, I disagree. They own the market, no matter what FB or Meebo do/say.”
I disagree with that… 4-5 years ago virtually everyone I knew was using AIM. AIM was it. Right now I’m looking at my meebo window where I’m logged into AIM (just added it for comparison’s sake), MSN, Gtalk, and Facebook, and I’m seeing one on AIM (as in zero) right now, tons on Facebook, and quite a few on Gtalk/MSN. Who’s to say the same thing couldn’t happen to MSN/Yahoo? I’d say its starting to head that direction now, especially with the developing and opening up of Facebook Chat.
*make that “no one on AIM” not “one on AIM”
That’s a pretty smart observation. Those IM networks are quite resilient to product mismanagement: see how AIM is the only growing/valuable part of AOL, so even a bunch of MBA product managers at Yahoo/AOL/MSFT/eBay are having a hard time destroying those IM networks, and there’s even room for Meebo likes to get a free ride for a while, cannibalizing on their loyal userbase.
Those IM friends connections are quite powerful, and the opennes of the protocol is quite irrelevant: I am on the network where all of my friends are, not on the one that has open protocol: I do not really care about interoperability all that much, because I only talk to friends, and not to strangers (I block them), and most AIM/Skype/MSN users are like ME lol!
this is where technology meets the stone age: http://twitter....om/primitiveman
a caveman on twitter
Digsby (owned by dotSyntax) is a nice idea and I am a personal user but I wish they could fix bugs a little quicker. Are there any other options that are better out there?
Great to see movement in this area.
I’ve been using Meebo for a while now — it’s great for remote access to my IM accounts (I’m really digging the new browser-based applications.) As for desktop use, since I’m an Apple owner, I use Adium. I’m waiting for Digsby to come out for the Mac OS (since it was all the rage for Windows for a while).
My IM usage has declined a lot recently. I wonder if it’s the same for anyone else…
I also don’t get it why meebo is so overrated. Google trends indicates meebo is not going up but it goes down. And it’s a crap service, at least for me. Every time I signed up to YM using their service, I’ll get disconnected at least once per hour while with original YM platform, I never got disconnected.
Like to see Meebo and imo.im release REST API with notification callbacks that mobile developers can use to connect to any IM.
They provide the pipe. They can monetize by adding ads in the message and impose on the third-party developers to always show the ads.
Sorry, which movie is that picture from?
Yahoo and Microsoft need to get with the times. They are struggling because they are so backwards!
http://www.digsby.com is what i use it covers pretty much ALL major IM + myspace/twitter/facebook.
From what I observe I used to have loads of people logged in on MSN and Yahoo Messenger. Now a lot of them seem to have given up with MSN and use Facebook chat instead. I am not a big fan of Facebook chat for long conversations but it is great for a quick chat.
Opening up SMS was smart because carriers charge per message — everybody wins. But what’s the incentive for free chat networks to open up? Seriously, why?
The issue with this argument is that you’re only talking 3rd party client support which isn’t really opening up.
Microsoft is adding Jabber support to Windows Live Messenger in the future, which means Yahoo will also be getting Jabber support, and AOL is adding Jabber support to AIM.
Facebook IM already runs on Jabber and will support federation in the future.
and Google Talk is also running Jabber with federation.
Federation is what makes IM open, not 3rd party client support that essentially just keeps us in the stone age only being able to IM people on the same network.
Hey, some people just like the Stone age, thats jsut the way it is dude.
RT
http://www.priv...-center.vze.com
Jabber is decentralised just like e-mail. ISPs, companies and even individual users can have their own jabber servers and there won’t be any big centralised networks anymore. No ‘jokers’ who put stuff like ‘all your private communication belogs to us and we’re free to use it as we please’.
Old IM is dead.
Consolidating/centralizing IM is so long overdue.
I was reading this article on Facebook and Meebo, and I was amused. Does anyone see what I see in regards to this Facebook innovation with Meebo. It is AOL from the 90’s, without charging customers. In the 80’s a game called Habitat which AOL purchased played an influential impact on today’s virtual communities. It is funny as Facebook innovates they are going back to where it all started with AOL. I like Facebook, they are cool, although I’m waiting for the day when I log in it will say ” Welcome” “You’ve Got Facebook”. My opinion on Yahoo and MSN, they are more focused on mobile platform innovation. There is more money in this sector.
Opening up to me means adopting a standard protocol, like IETF XMPP, not making bilateral deals to connect proprietary APIs.
Messaging on the web won’t be “open” until it is federated just like email, and to some extent, IRC, and the companies involved give up control of the protocol to a public standards body.
i fail to see how it will make them more money.
Check out EnetBaron.com
Check out EnetBaron.com
Hehehe, is that Steve Ballmer with long hair in the caveman picture?
in the future
Windows Live messenger makes money out of advertising and it also is the largest IM network in the world with around 500m active users.
What incentive does it have to open up and allow sanctioned third party access to their network of users? Will Meebo be sharing advertising revenue with Microsoft or Yahoo?
trillian?
Great picture!