Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Instant Messaging

Author:Richard Sucgang
Posted:8/1/1999; 1:22:23 PM
Topic:Today's scriptingNews Outline
Msg #:8979 (In response to 8972)
Prev/Next:8978 / 8980

All this talk about Instant Messaging being such a new thing. Much of the emergent "user-friendly" Internet is about dredging up what the interconnected Unix hacker culture always had. Gopher/ftp? WWW. E-mail? _Styled_ e-mail. Now Instant Messaging - well, formerly known as irc (Internet Relay Chat). irc built up such a following - it was in such real time, people built sophisticated robots and games that ran in text mode. irc remains a "hidden" jewel among Internet denizens, and all the flak about IM interconnecting can be made much clearer if they expanded on the irc protocol instead of pushing the IM concept as a proprietary goldmine.

That being said - my friends and I keep in touch with AbbottChat to find out if someone is online, and then we talk with iVisit - and excellent crossplatform conferencing tool that melds "instant messaging", voice-over-IP, and video-over-IP. Teeny program, too, less than 600K in size (did I mention that both products are free to download?).

http://www.abbottsys.com http://www.ivisit.com

Both, of course, aren't specifically tied to an ISP. And I think that is what makes the whole thing so attractive. Both AOL and MS have vested interests in making their respective ISP's work...but we know that the internet is large, larger than any software platform, larger than any one browser, and certainly larger than any one ISP. Both companies want their respective ISPs to be the gateway to the Internet...

-r

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