By Nick Patience
Yahoo Inc has been just about the quietest of the instant messaging players in the recent battle over interoperability and standards but it insists it does plan to interoperate with the other instant messaging systems such as America Online Inc’s IM, Microsoft Corp’s MSN Messenger and Tribal Voice Inc’s PowWow.
Yahoo was one of the signatories on Microsoft’s letter it sent to AOL in July after it launched MSN Messenger urging AOL to allow users to send and receive messages using their AOL screen name to and from MSN Messenger. However, that’s about it as far as participation in the process goes so far.
Brian Park, senior producer for Yahoo Messenger says the company does not have a presence at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), whose instant messaging and presence protocol (IMPP) working group looks like being the place from which an eventual standard will emerge. But Park says that will be resolved soon. Last week, Microsoft submitted its protocols to the working group as the basis of a possible standard, but as we all know, a Microsoft protocol does not a standard make. And interoperability is not the same as an instant messaging standard, as AOL regularly points out. However, Park says the Microsoft move is a good step in the right direction.
At the moment, Yahoo Messenger doesn’t interoperate with any other vendor but does tightly integrate with the other Yahoo services, such as news, stocks, calendar and so on. Also the company does not have plans at this stage to publish its protocols or submit it to the IETF, partly because they are fairly complicated – and probably contain too much proprietary information at this stage, as far as we can gather. As Park puts it, we didn’t build this for public consumption.
