The low-level conflict over instant messaging between Cerulean Studios, a startup software company, and America Online continued on Thursday, without AOL achieving its goal of stopping the upstart. AOL vowed to keep fighting.
Trillian, Cerulean Studio's instant messaging application that allows people to chat with users of all major messaging systems through one interface, was working perfectly with AOL's Instant Messenger. Trillian users had no trouble sending messages to AIM users -- which was not the story earlier in the week, when AOL implemented a block that prevented Trillian from accessing its system.
That sparked a battle between the companies: Cerulean Studios issued frequent AOL-compatible updates to its software, and AOL worked to render those updates incompatible. It's unclear how long Trillian's current compatibility will last; AOL says that Trillian is "hacking" into its software, and the company is always working to prevent security breaches.
This kind of fight is not new. Several times over the years, AOL's competitors have tried to make their systems attractive by offering compatibility with AIM, prompting AOL to block those systems. Small and large companies have been foiled by AOL -- including Microsoft, which joined with other IM companies in 2000 to petition the government to force AOL to open up its chatter.
AOL's justification for blocking the other companies is always the same: It would like to have an "interoperable" system, but these upstart companies are only offering unsecure interoperability, which harms users in the end, the company maintains.
But after two years of this kind of conflict, the tumult over Trillian indicates something pretty simple: Although instant messaging is more popular than ever, an all-in-one system is something that many users desire -- even if that system is, as AOL claims, jerry-built.
Trillian offers compatibility with AIM and other chat systems by donning a kind of high-tech disguise: The creators learn the secret language of AIM servers, and they have their software ape that language, pretending it's part of the system.
But as an AOL spokeswoman pointed out, in order to use such a system, a user has to tell the software his AIM username and password, which is an inherently dangerous practice.
"That's not interoperability," AOL's Kathy McKiernan said. "This is about a company releasing software that hacks into our system, and that endangers our users."
McKiernan said that "true interoperability" would be like e-mail, in which you wouldn't have to be on the same service as another person to send that fellow an IM. Ideally, then Steve Case, AOL TimeWarner's chairman, could use AIM to send a message to Microsoft chairman Bill Gates' MSN Messenger account, without Case having to sign on to MSN himself.
McKiernan said that this is a technologically difficult task, but that "no company has done more than ours" to meet that goal. Last year, AOL began interoperability trials with both Sun and IBM, attempting to implement a standard proposed by the Internet Engineering Task Force.
None of the other big IM companies have carried out such tests, though all maintain that they also want an interoperable system. A Microsoft spokeswoman said the company is also working with the IETF on standards, but she declined to offer Microsoft's views toward Trillian.
It turns out in the world of instant messaging believe, as AOL does, that IM should be more like e-mail. Jabber, a company offering an open-source, XML-based instant messaging system, has long argued for such a thing.
The problem is, though, Jabber's system would likely not jibe with AOL's designs. Andre Durand, Jabber's founder, wants IM to be decentralized, with no single company having the monopoly on servers, the way AOL and other chat systems now have.
Last year, Durand told Wired News: "There is a demand for this to come in-house. Companies don't want their employees using a proprietary system to chat with each other. ISPs don't want their customers to go to AOL to chat. The game is not about who has more end-users. It's about who's providing the infrastructure."
And although Trillian isn't the sort of "infrastructure" that Durand envisioned, it did seem to at least ape that message-anyone world of interoperability well enough that users fell in love with it.
At Download.com, Trillian has a 93 percent user-approval rating -- those are Napster-like numbers (in Napster's heyday).
"Once I finally got wise and ditched AOL," wrote one user at the site, "I started meeting folks using different IM's (AIM, MSN Messenger, ICQ, etc.) I used to have to keep all these on my computer.... Finally, I found Trillian. What a great program. Works well with all platforms and I never get kicked off of AIM. I highly recommend it."
