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This comment >What's the point of creating an "open" protocol, when AOL has already opened theirs? ICQ, of course is totally stupid, lagged, and insecure. I wa
by bdz 8y ago
This comment
>What's the point of creating an "open" protocol, when AOL has already opened theirs? ICQ, of course is totally stupid, lagged, and insecure. I was glad to hear that AOL bought them out...maybe it will add some of the AOL stability to it.
- ge0rg 8y agoTwenty years ago, ICQ and AIM were two different, incompatible, networks, and AOL did everything it could to prevent third-party clients: From http://www.linux-mag.com/id/902/ http://www.linux-mag.com/id/902/ : But AOL has always been adamant about not wanting their users’ screen names and their passwords going through any software that’s not controlled by them. It’s an understandable position. I don’t know if it gives them the right to try as hard as they do to block everybody. From https://nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/ https://nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/ : AOL was causing the client to look up a particular address in memory and send it back to the server. This was tricky, vastly trickier than anything they’d done so far. It was also a bit outside the realm of fair play: exploiting a security hole in their own client that our client didn’t have! And they even used trademarks on terms like "instant messenger" and "buddy list" to fight competition: https://www.wired.com/1999/05/does-aol-own-buddy-list/ https://www.wired.com/1999/05/does-aol-own-buddy-list/
- toast0 8y agoAround the same time frame, AOL had also released a protocol spec for TOC, which was sort of useful for talking to AIM (although it missed enough functionality that you would eventually want to use the fully proprietary protocol anyway)