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The Merger of the Mighty Messengers

After repeated attempts to provide the much sought after inter-connectivity of popular IM's, YIM and MIM are AIMing at a pass through connection.

Yahoo and MSN messengers will use the SIMPLE, and this is simple compared to it's full name of SIP for Instant Messaging Presence leveraging Extensions, protocol to allow presence and connection options to be passed between to the two IM layers.

The plan is to consolidate market share and try and pull users away from AOL's Instant Messenger.

The new operation is planned to be available in Q2 2006 but will be restricted (at least early on) to messaging, there are no plans for voice enabling of the service. This is in part due to the perceived complexity of allowing voice connections between the two partners. In reality it should not be too difficult as both are already SIP based, rather then H.323.

A search on the web digs up a Java API to the SIMPLE protocol. This brings new options to vendors as with a simple integration they could see the benefits of presence awareness in the MSNYahoo space.

It will be interesting to see how AOL will react to this and what about Google, are there plans in the offing for them. Google Talk requires that you have a gmail account first. Today this means you have to know someone and receive a request.

Will they create an inter-operability model or stay standalone?
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