Historically, IM has existed on closed and proprietary systems, with dedicated clients that can only connect to a single network. For many years users with accounts on multiple networks (say, AOL and MSN), would have to keep multiple programs open, which ate up system resources and cluttered desktops. By 2000 a handful of clients emerged that would allow users to manage multiple IM accounts from a single program. These stayed largely under the radar until 2002, when a client called Trillian hit 1 million downloads (and then jumped to 5 million six months later).

IM is also ripe for innovation, but developers have been hampered by a near-complete lack of cooperation from the major IM networks. Perhaps developers will take advantage of the growing number of networks that are open, adding new features that make them attractive to users still stuck on the old behemoths. Then Yahoo and Microsoft might be compelled to finally change - or perish.

Have you ever wanted to have all your online contacts in one place? With Invite2Messenger, now you can! This great new service allows you to easily invite your Facebook contacts over to chat on Windows Live Messenger.

You can now also access and update your Facebook account within Messenger. Check your messages or write on your friend's wall. Send a cheeky poke or browse through photo albums. You can even update your status directly from Messenger!

From the beginning, Google has been committed to open standards and interoperation for instant messaging. So when our friends at AOL agreed to let Gmail users talk to users on their network, we jumped at the chance.

Today we are happy to tell you about a new feature we've started to roll out which will enable you to sign into your AIM account and chat with your AIM buddies right inside Gmail. When you log in to AIM through Gmail chat, your AOL buddies will appear in your chat list with friends from your Google Talk network, and you will see the yellow 'running man' logo to the right of your AIM friends' screen names. To your AIM friends it will look like you are logged in to AIM as usual.

There was a presentation by one of the folks at Microsoft at Georgia Tech that talked a little bit about the future of Messenger. Can you talk a little bit about that? It mentioned some things like interoperability with AOL and Google as being in the works.

Jones: I think that the person works on my team, and they were quoted out of context. We obviously have some work that we're working on with Messenger in terms of the platform and the direction that we're headed, but the things that were quoted and said, they aren't on our roadmap in any kind of public way.

Where are things as far as interoperability with some of the other folks?

Jones: We have an agreement with Yahoo on interop, and that's about the extent of what we've done. I can't discuss things on other networks, but certainly we've had conversations with other folks. And the work that we've done on our contact interchange is just an example of the kinds of things that we’ll expect to do in the future.

I do think over time IM networks are going to interoperate. It's just challenging from a business perspective for everybody to agree to do that right now.

If this gets rolled out to regular users, there will soon be two major IM camps: Yahoo-Microsoft and Google-AOL. It's funny how a $1 billion investment gets things moving along.

On the Google side, I can simply refer to our official statement, and give our stock answer, "We are working actively on integrating AIM access in Google Talk."
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AOL also appears to be working on an XMPP gateway for AIM, which would allow XMPP/Jabber clients to access the AIM network using AIM screen names. Based on the public information, it looks like this should be available in the near future.