I always use the mouse to open up IM windows anyway, so better to keep the keyboard interface uncluttered.and I hate "applet" type programs that put buttons on the taskbar. I personally like having the way the buddy list window doesn't show up in the task bar or the alt-tab list, and so doesn't get in my way when I'm doing "real" work. I just wanted to chip in on Trillan: some of its UI oddments are quite intentional. While that seems perfectly workable to me, AIM is undoubtedly simpler.Unless we get to the point where AOL (and MSN, Yahoo, et al) make their services untenable for a large number of people (by, say, moving to a subscription model or somesuch) I imagine that we're going to see the vast majority of instant messaging in corporate hands, rather than being based on open standards.At least they seem to have more or less given up trying to prevent people from hacking their protocols.Sorry for the rambling post. It only makes sense for them to want to keep the protocol closed, as much as it sucks for us.The other option is an open internet protocol (such as Jabber), but that is, by necessity, a more distributed system, with many servers all across the net. I'm sure they get quite a bit of ad revenue off the official client, but running AIM has to be kind of expensive. Also, AOL is basically footing the bill for all the user databases and servers and whatnot. There are some hard working hackers out there, I must say.It's kind of sad that AIM has become the dominant messaging platform, but it does simplify things in a way, in that all user accounts are on one centralized server. Your mileage may vary.I do occasionally miss having file transfers and such, but being behind NAT, half the time those things don't want to work properly for me even on the regular AIM client.What's really amazing is that all of the clients that support Oscar (other than official AIM obviously) are using reverse engineered knowledge of the Oscar protocol.
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