Notes
I'm surprised reading such pessimistic comments from the XMPP crowd about the possibility of microsoft adopting the XMPP standard.
Actually they already announced to support AIM and GTalk in the future. That makes me think they are already working on an XMPP Gateway.
Link:
http://www.liveside.net/blogs/ma...ation-
whew.aspx
Hello Pedro,
I agree with you that AOL is forced to moved to XMPP (See: http://www.process-one.net/en/bl...osoft_yahoo_1/)
.
And I do not think too that Microsoft will adopt XMPP. federation is not the kind of thing MS likes.
fabieuse,
my reservations about Microsoft are more technical than philosophical or political really.
If you discount Microsoft own domains like msn.com and hotmail.com, the users of the MSN network can use any valid email address as a MSN id.
That makes it very difficult to use XMPP as it is intended.
Sure I could be melo%40simplicidade.org@msn.com or something bizarre like that, but somehow I don't see it happening.
The current Yahoo integration, and the possible future AIM and GTalk integration are equivalent to setting up a X.25 link between two companies, not an open federation model like XMPP. Sure, it might benefit MSN users in the short term, but it will only strengthen MSN hold on them.
I speak for myself, not for the XMPP community, but I think we all aim higher than that.
Best regards,
Hey Pedro,
have you seen what Google is doing now?
http://googletalk.blogspot.com/2...ition-
with.html
With Google Apps Team Edition you can now use E-Mail adresses not hostet by Google as your Google Talk ID.
I have a domain hosted by german provider 1&1, which has it's own XMPP server. Now after registering for Google Apps Team Edition i can log in on two completely different Jabber servers with the exact same ID.
That's kind of weird, isn't it?
But basically that's the same situation as with the MSN messenger IDs.
The only difference ist that with the new Google Apps IDs you currently can only add people within the same domain to your roster. But somehow i suspect that will change in the future. (I'm becoming speculative now)
I really could imagine that being just a beta test for Google and that they are going to "GTalk enable" any Google account (where you can also use any valid E-Mail adress).
And the problem with the bizarre IDs you mentioned above can be handled easily. the "bizarre IDs" only have to be used internally, the user doesn't have to see them at all if the client is smart enough. It just needs to use a pulldown menu in the "add contact" dialogue. When Microsoft and Yahoo connected their networks one year ago they had the exact same problem: Any Yahoo ID can also be a MSN ID. So they solved it by adding a pulldown menu where you can choose which service the contact is using. Adding Google Talk and Jabber to that list would be easy...
Hi Fabieuse,
Yes, I know that you can use your own domain with Google Apps. A friend of mine hosts his domain there, including his own XMPP server powered by the GTalk server.
I guess you could delegate the XMPP records of your domain to Microsoft and use their XMPP gateway to MSN.
You might be able to log on to two different servers with the same domain, but the XMPP federation network will only be able to use one of them, the one that gets the SRV pointers.
Lastly, Google Talk hosting of foreign domains is not that good: you can't have a certificate for each domain, so secure comunications are not possible.
As for bizarre IDs, yes the client could translate visually melo%40simplicidade.org@foreign.msn.com to melo@simplicidad.org (MSN) but this is not supported by the protocol. It is something that would need to be hardcoded on each client.
As I said, yes, Microsoft could add MSNXMPP gateway *technicaly* but because they allow foreign domains as IDs, this will not be as straighforward as Yahoo, AIM, ICQ or even .Mac.
Best regards,
fabieuse,
I miss read the Google Apps for Teams specs. This is indeed crazy stuff 
.
Yes, they are creating islands of the same domain inside Google Talk.
Its an interesting concept really. I wonder if users know that they loose open federation with everybody else not using GTalk network.
Best regards,
Commenting by HaloScan
