Comments on: AOL, AIM and Openness

By: Mark Doliner

Mark Doliner — Tue, 18 May 2010 04:57:19 +0000

Truefire: I’m not sure I follow… is _what_ somehow fixed in the recently-released Pidgin 2.7.0?

By: Truefire

Truefire — Thu, 13 May 2010 17:34:09 +0000

I say get some reverse engineering done on the new protocol. This will have least impact on the end users.

This comment is pretty new for a rather old post…is this somehow fixed in the ‘new’ 2.7.0?

By: Baylink

Baylink — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 23:29:50 +0000

Well, that’s fine, and all, but the issue is Metcalfe’s law: the people who are going to use a multiprotocol IM client are doing it *because there are people on those networks they want to talk to*.

And that’s a much larger number, in aggregate.

Dropping AIM screws Pidgin, and its users, not the network, and not those people at the other end; I really hope Pidgin doesn’t.

If it does, I’ll have to replace it in my image at work… or move *everyone* to a local Jabber server, which is almost as painful.

By: Albert

Albert — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 19:25:33 +0000

Coincidence? http://www.fool.com/investing/high-growth/2010/04/06/is-aol-killing-the-messenger.aspx

By: Alex

Alex — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 02:50:11 +0000

It’s 9 years! We took that project class in the spring of 01.

By: Rob Gibson

Rob Gibson — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 14:44:54 +0000

Sadly, I think the time has come to consider the ultimate fate of a proprietary protocol. AIM has been the juggernaut for years, but I haven’t spent a great deal of time on AIM, even though I log into that account every time I run Pidgin.

For my 2 cents, the two most important networks (Google and Facebook) run Jabber/XMPP. Everyone I regularly talk to via an IM is available through one of these two services.

I would like to see some refinement here, particularly in the notifications. Users on Jabber/XMPP accounts seem to go offline regularly and come right back on. But otherwise, the support is spot-on. I haven’t checked the bug tracker, but I think I will now.

It’s just a gut instinct that tells me that well-documented XML being passed around seems far more useful and flexible than a protocol whose sole source of documentation is turning its back on an entire developer community.

By: AOL, AIM and Openness | Pidgin.cz

AOL, AIM and Openness | Pidgin.cz — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 10:31:49 +0000

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