What can be learned from the history of instant messengers in the era of distributed SNS turbulence such as Threads, Mastodon, Misskey?
Twitter has undergone a major staff reduction and renovation since it was acquired by Elon Musk. However, due to
Instant Messenger History: Lessons for the Threads Era of Social Media
https://tedium.co/2023/07/12/instant-messenger-competition-history/
The pioneering existence of an instant messenger client that can be used on Windows is ' ICQ ' released by Israeli company Mirabilis in 1996. And in 1997, Internet service provider America Online (AOL) released ' AOL Instant Messenger (AIM)', which is a competitive tool for ICQ.
Originally, AIM was a proprietary tool that worked only with AOL clients, but instant messenger functionality was available to non-AOL users. This led to a significant increase in the number of users of AIM, and AIM became one of the largest forces among instant messengers. In 1998, AOL acquired Mirabilis, which developed ICQ.
Also, OSCAR (Open System for Communication in Realtime), the protocol of AIM, was initially undisclosed, but it was analyzed by reverse engineering by some users, and many third-party messenger clients appeared, which also contributed to the spread of AIM. connected to MSN Messenger , released by Microsoft in 1999, was also designed to allow users to send messages to AOL users, but AOL, which had kept the OSCAR protocol private, was furious with this and blocked communication from the MSN Messenger client. Did.
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David Euerbach, a former Microsoft developer, said in his blog that he reverse engineered the compatibility of AIM and MSN Messenger as follows.
“Microsoft foresaw that getting new users to join MSN Messenger would be a challenge when many people were already using other instant messengers. messenger users can't talk to ICQ users and of course none of them talk to MSN messenger users, at the time AIM had the largest user share so we discussed the possibility of modifying MSN Messenger to allow simultaneous logins to two servers, Microsoft and AOL, which we called 'Interop'.'
'The interop wasn't very elegant, but it wasn't too complicated either... I didn't have the 'key' to crack AIM's OSCAR protocol, but my boss and I could All I had to do was register an AIM account and use Network Monitor to monitor the communication between the AIM client and the server, so I could check what protocol AIM was using.'
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AIM, which occupied the top class user share in the instant messenger industry, merged with Time Warner in 2000, which changed the wind direction greatly. One of the terms of the merger was that AOL would open up AIM's OSCAR protocol. According to the records of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), AOL made efforts in standardization, but gave up in a few years. However, at this time AOL allowed the use of the OSCAR protocol for the instant messenger ' iChat ' developed by Apple at that time. Tedium claims that iChat was the predecessor of iMessage and became the de facto replacement for AIM after AIM retired in December 2017.
However, the open source instant messenger protocol that AOL failed to develop will be born in the form of ' XMPP ' based on the protocol called Jabber. Mr. Jerimy Miller, who led the development of Jabber based on XML, said in an interview in 2001 as follows.
'I used ICQ for a few months after it came out in 1995 or 1996, but I stopped using it because no one knew about it. A year later, an acquaintance of mine used ICQ. I started using it, so I started using ICQ again, so it caught on again, friends and colleagues started using it, they were using ICQ at home and at work, after a while one of my friends started using AIM When I became a user of AIM, I realized that AIM was on a completely different network than ICQ, and I always thought AOL was making fun of its users, so I didn't like AIM. AIM's interface is terrible and you can't access anything other than what AOL has to offer, which sounds like a bad thing, users pay for a simple interface and it goes nowhere No.”
by Brendan Dolan-Gavitt
Jabber, which Mr. Miller started developing with such thoughts, later became XMPP. One of the companies that has entered the development of this XMPP is Google. While participating in the development of XMPP, Google adopted XMPP for its instant messenger, Google Talk .
However, even though Google collaborated on the development of the open source XMPP standard, it implemented XMPP in a closed form that no one could review. Google Talk had severe restrictions on the functionality of the XMPP protocol, so other clients that adopted XMPP were not compatible with Google Talk. Also, due to frequent communication errors between Google's server and other XMPP client servers, the XMPP developer community was forced to monitor and debug Google's server, which led to a rapid slowdown in development.
Google Talk is easy to use if you have a Google account, so most of the XMPP client users were Google Talk users. However, Google did not respect XMPP, which it did not lead the development of, and as a result announced that it would switch to Google Hangouts based on its own proprietary protocol, and Google Talk was terminated in May 2013. bottom. Naturally, most of the users disappeared from the XMPP community at this time.
by Gregor Smith
Tedium states that Google's destruction of XMPP is the ultimate example of a strategy consisting of three stages: adoption, expansion, and extinction, and points out that such a strategy is being followed by many companies, not just Google. doing. “The cannibalization of a federation protocol that can interoperate between different applications into a centralized service is almost the key to a successful consumer product,” said Moxie Merlinspike, creator of Signal, an open-source encrypted messenger. It's a sure thing, like Slack did for IRC, Facebook did for email, WhatsApp did for XMPP, federation services are outdated and centralized The services provided will be repeated to the present day and to the future.'
“XMPP episodes are often brought up in discussions about open source social networks such as Mastodon, mostly as a lesson,” Tedium said. Mastodon and Misskey are open source distributed SNSs that use an open source protocol called 'ActivityPub', and Threads announced by Instagram is also planning to support ActivityPub. However, Tedium warned, ``If you look at the long history of the Internet, it is clear that problems like XMPP will be repeated.''
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