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> “If an e-mail program can survive the merciless scrutiny of the internet community, it’s got to be good,” How comes email managed to federate multiple incomp

by wogna 9y ago

> “If an e-mail program can survive the merciless scrutiny of the internet community, it’s got to be good,” How comes email managed to federate multiple incompatible systems (MCI,MS Mail,X.400,etc.) into an open RFC standard, where other protocols (instant messaging in particular) failed?

ghaff 9y ago
Interesting question. I'd speculate that IM in particular was unified enough around AOL and SMS. (And clients like Trillium did work across systems.) And with smartphone apps and notifications, having a single universal messaging client was less important. Email was quite fractured at one time but it did become pretty interoperable when it went mainstream.
- Macha 9y ago
  AIM was not a unified IM system. For starters, they made it hard to sign up outside the US (the sign up form needed a valid zip code). As a result MSN was more popular in Western Europe, and I get the impression that ICQ took the lead in Eastern Europe. (until Skype, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp took over)
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    Msn messenger didn't become popular until XP shipped. At that point MS made it load on boot and nag you about signing up. And at that point ICQ had been around for years.
  - kps 9y ago
    Apple's iChat was an AIM client, until they dropped it for iMessage and screwed the existing users. (Am I seeing a pattern here?)
    - ascagnel_ 9y ago
      I don't think Apple so much as dropped support for AIM as much as AIM dropped support for its more-open OSCAR protocol -- the same thing that apps like Pidgin used to connect to AIM. The trend is that the people running the IM services want control of the clients, and so they shut off outside access or create new services that never support open protocols (see also: Facebook Chat, Google Hangouts, Apple iMessage).
  - verri 9y ago
    I can't comment on the situation in eastern-europe, but what essentially killed any chance of standardization here in west-europe was the dominance of MSN messenger that came bundled with Windows. Their embrace/extend/extinguish approach towards IRC didn't help either.
digi_owl 9y ago
Because email came from academia while IM was commercial from the start...
- mxuribe 9y ago
  Very much agree with your comment here...but I'd add that the thinking behind email was to idealistically connect people, while IM was to connect people specifically for the purposes of making money, building a business, etc. I wish the feeling behind email still existed, at least in an altruistic sense...Nowadays, it seems like everyone is simply jumping on whatever platform is the hottest of the moment. My daughter and her friends constantly have to jump between a handful of proprietary "messaging" platforms to contact each other...and of course as a curmudgeon Dad, i remind her that "in my day", we would just ping each other via email, and we liked it by gum! ;-) Seriously though, I sure hope we all standardize on something like matrix.org (the protocol) for both short-term/fast-paced (IM/chat-style) messaging as well as the longer form style of classic email. One platform (and client) - based on something like matrix - to rule all of my messaging needs would be so awesome!
  - KGIII 9y ago
    Your comment made me pause. IM has a longer history than you might think. You could send instant messages to people on your network, long before there was anything commercial about it. IM functions have existed on systems for a very long time. Some of them even had groups and various permissions associated with that. On top of that, there were overall user permissions with varied levels. They could send messages to other people in their same usergroups. An example would be /wallops or /globops, and similar commands. You still see that functionality built into things like IRC servers and some clients. There was also a /msg{user} command. There were also messages sent to the operator on duty, and things like that. So, this doesn't detract from your overall point. I just figured you should know that IM wasn't created as a business, so much as it was a way to communicate with other people. It would be many years before people sought a profit in it, the monitorization of it was a bit later than that. The first monetization efforts, that I remember, were in selling products (and services) that made it easier on internal networks. For a while, Novell was pretty big in that space, but they weren't the first. IM has quite a history. Someone should write a book on it.
detaro 9y ago
At that time, there wasn't much commercial interest in having e-mail fragmented. For messengers, no company wanted to give up their users and their things. For a while, multi-clients like Pidgin, Miranda or Trillian sort of fixed that for users, now we pretty much seem to be back to darker ages in that regard, thanks to tons of messengers being based on "one mobile device per account" models. You see some of that with e-mail and development around it as well (webmail for more features instead of clients and protocols, ...)
- stinkytaco 9y ago
  In my time I have had high hopes for the following: WebRTC, XMPP, Zephyr, Ricochet, or one of the commercial protocols becoming standard. I now have high hopes for RCS and Matrix, but I'm not terribly optimistic.

by wogna 9y ago

ghaff 9y ago

Interesting question. I'd speculate that IM in particular was unified enough around AOL and SMS. (And clients like Trillium did work across systems.) And with smartphone apps and notifications, having a single universal messaging client was less important. Email was quite fractured at one time but it did become pretty interoperable when it went mainstream.

Macha 9y ago
AIM was not a unified IM system. For starters, they made it hard to sign up outside the US (the sign up form needed a valid zip code). As a result MSN was more popular in Western Europe, and I get the impression that ICQ took the lead in Eastern Europe. (until Skype, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp took over)
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Msn messenger didn't become popular until XP shipped. At that point MS made it load on boot and nag you about signing up. And at that point ICQ had been around for years.
- kps 9y ago
  Apple's iChat was an AIM client, until they dropped it for iMessage and screwed the existing users. (Am I seeing a pattern here?)
  - ascagnel_ 9y ago
    I don't think Apple so much as dropped support for AIM as much as AIM dropped support for its more-open OSCAR protocol -- the same thing that apps like Pidgin used to connect to AIM. The trend is that the people running the IM services want control of the clients, and so they shut off outside access or create new services that never support open protocols (see also: Facebook Chat, Google Hangouts, Apple iMessage).
- verri 9y ago
  I can't comment on the situation in eastern-europe, but what essentially killed any chance of standardization here in west-europe was the dominance of MSN messenger that came bundled with Windows. Their embrace/extend/extinguish approach towards IRC didn't help either.

digi_owl 9y ago

Because email came from academia while IM was commercial from the start...

mxuribe 9y ago
Very much agree with your comment here...but I'd add that the thinking behind email was to idealistically connect people, while IM was to connect people specifically for the purposes of making money, building a business, etc. I wish the feeling behind email still existed, at least in an altruistic sense...Nowadays, it seems like everyone is simply jumping on whatever platform is the hottest of the moment. My daughter and her friends constantly have to jump between a handful of proprietary "messaging" platforms to contact each other...and of course as a curmudgeon Dad, i remind her that "in my day", we would just ping each other via email, and we liked it by gum! ;-) Seriously though, I sure hope we all standardize on something like matrix.org (the protocol) for both short-term/fast-paced (IM/chat-style) messaging as well as the longer form style of classic email. One platform (and client) - based on something like matrix - to rule all of my messaging needs would be so awesome!
- KGIII 9y ago
  Your comment made me pause. IM has a longer history than you might think. You could send instant messages to people on your network, long before there was anything commercial about it. IM functions have existed on systems for a very long time. Some of them even had groups and various permissions associated with that. On top of that, there were overall user permissions with varied levels. They could send messages to other people in their same usergroups. An example would be /wallops or /globops, and similar commands. You still see that functionality built into things like IRC servers and some clients. There was also a /msg{user} command. There were also messages sent to the operator on duty, and things like that. So, this doesn't detract from your overall point. I just figured you should know that IM wasn't created as a business, so much as it was a way to communicate with other people. It would be many years before people sought a profit in it, the monitorization of it was a bit later than that. The first monetization efforts, that I remember, were in selling products (and services) that made it easier on internal networks. For a while, Novell was pretty big in that space, but they weren't the first. IM has quite a history. Someone should write a book on it.

detaro 9y ago

At that time, there wasn't much commercial interest in having e-mail fragmented. For messengers, no company wanted to give up their users and their things. For a while, multi-clients like Pidgin, Miranda or Trillian sort of fixed that for users, now we pretty much seem to be back to darker ages in that regard, thanks to tons of messengers being based on "one mobile device per account" models. You see some of that with e-mail and development around it as well (webmail for more features instead of clients and protocols, ...)

stinkytaco 9y ago
In my time I have had high hopes for the following: WebRTC, XMPP, Zephyr, Ricochet, or one of the commercial protocols becoming standard. I now have high hopes for RCS and Matrix, but I'm not terribly optimistic.