Instant chats and central servers

Tue May 8 21:44:36 UTC 2001

On a partially related topic, I've recently run across a service that tries
to put all the instant messenging services together in one package. Check
out Jabber.com; it's still under development, but it seems like it may be a
good idea in the making. Redundancy in messengers may be useful, but the
program's still a teeny bit buggy.

On 5/8/2001 at 11:35:27 -0700, Sean Donelan wroteified:
> 
> A question (and a test to see if I'm still subscribed)
> 
> The various instant messenging services, such as AIM, ICQ, Microsoft,
> Yahoo, other Messenger uses a central server to manage "presence".
> 
> No central server appears to mean no instant messages, am I correct?
> 
> What does this have to do with NANOG, apparently it is becoming more
> common for backbone NOC folks to communicate with their friends in
> other NOCs via one of these instant chat programs.  I didn't realize
> how common it was until I was informed about it last month when AOL/AIM
> had difficulties.  This month Yahoo Messenger had power difficulties,
> which disrupted their central servers.
> 
> If folks are using this these services for real-time communications,
> should we be trying to improve their reliability?  Or is this just a
> "feature" of how presence services work.
> 
> 

-- 
Dave Israel
Senior Manager, IP Backbone
Intermedia Business Internet