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On open protocols

Fred Oliveira on July 15, 2006

Being open source advocates, we’ve always been fans of protocol interoperability - like on instant messaging, or voice over IP. Two pieces of news this week are interesting enough to point out and talk about: Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger interoperation and Skype’s protocol reverse engineering.

Instant messaging:

Yahoo! Microsoft and Yahoo! announced that their IM clients are now able to talk to each-other, exciting news given that together they target around 350 million internet users. However, the simple fact that they took this one step and refused to go all the way and allow Jabber (XMPP) interoperability - thus talking to Google Talk and a slew of other IM clients - is a little disappointing.

Considering the increasing adoption of Jabber by companies like Google or Six Apart with LiveJournal, it should be exciting for companies to be able to connect communities and tap into that - even if for marketing reasons. It’s rather strange that we don’t see more interoperation in the IM space.

Voice over IP:

Skype Skype is great - we all love it. However, the simple fact that it doesn’t communicate with SIP-based devices or software (like Asterisk) is a shame. Not that I don’t understand why Ebay would insist in keeping it as a closed protocol - they need to insure revenue through the client and maintain monopoly -, but given their status they might aim for the greater good instead of the greater wallet.

The fact that the Skype protocol may have been reverse engineered is interesting, though - off the top of my head I can think of a few ways the discovery could be used to benefit a global audience: like the development of Skype-SIP gateways, or the creation of new, open-source clients for the network.

Concluding thoughts:

Open protocols can have a similar effect to how APIs caused a stir in web development by allowing the quick development of mash-ups. Systems that can transparently communicate with each-other allow for a few important things like fast adoption, brand awareness and accelerated innovation. But, as we all know, money is still the big picture for most companies so things are unlikely to change.


Comments on this post

TheBizofKnowledge

Just wanted to leave a quick comment about the IM interoperability issue: I completely agree that MSN and Yahoo should have gone all the way to include Jabber. It really doesn’t make sense that they stopped short — unless they are deliberately trying to freeze out Google et al.

Tijs

Since Skype has a proprietary protocol that needs servers (or super nodes as they call them) to function i wonder if they -can- open up their network to work with SIP. If people just started to use their own clients the network would come tumbling doen since there wouldn’t be enough super nodes to support everybody.

Something to say?