Proprietary protocols are things from yesterday. Today, Opensource technologies are taking over the world! AOL / ICQ has just launched a test server using XMPP, an open technology. This means that you’ll soon be able to talk to your ICQ / AIM contacts via Jabber. Google has already started using it. So who’s next? MSN!
AOL seems to be making its ICQ and AIM services compatible with XMPP: xmpp.oscar.aol.com PS: it’s still buggy and is only claimed to work in Exodus and Coccinella. It works in nearly all Jabber clients. But that is probably because the server is overloaded.
There has been a vivid discussion today on the Jdev MUC room about this. It looks like Jabber will be the solution which will rule the future of all messengers.
You can try to log in to ICQ with the username icqnumber@aol.com on server xmpp.oscar.aol.com on port 5222. TLS is required.
Let’s see what happens in the next few months with Jabber.
You can find Jabber Hosting for your Domain on Flosoft.biz . You’ll probably be able to chat to your ICQ contacts soon!
UPDATE: AIM seems to work too!
UPDATE2: There is a tutorial here on how to setup your Jabber Client
UPDATE3: I just recieved this picture from jjkobra. It works with Gajim! 
UPDATE4: It seems to work in Psi too!
UPDATE5: A comment by AOL.
Thursday, January 17th, 2008, 10:17 pm | 
Jabber, Linux | 
RSS feed
| 
Respond | 
Trackback
17. January, 2008 at 11:17 pm
I hope soon that every body will start using Jabber.
Let’s fight, to win!
Long life to Jabbber.
17. January, 2008 at 11:39 pm
As for the MSN part:
http://www.liveside.net/blogs/main/archive/2007/10/31/messenger-9-gtalk-integration-messenger-api-new-client-for-mac-os-x-news-unveiled-at-georgia-tech-presentation-whew.aspx
And install a pyicq-t on flosoft.biz in the meantime
17. January, 2008 at 11:50 pm
Confirmed working in gajim on win32. This is an amazing find, thank you.
18. January, 2008 at 1:19 am
Works just fine in Adium on OS X as well. One client I’m sending to is seeing html tags in the messages though.
18. January, 2008 at 1:58 am
Although host finds in DNS two servers available (64.12.91.163, 205.188.104.130), only the first one works.
18. January, 2008 at 2:45 am
GAJIM 0.11.4 on linux working, but….some things are really fun. (for example the nick i see as mine is changing randomly – but just at ICQ, other account works well)
18. January, 2008 at 5:24 am
Holy cow. Only 8 years late to the party. Still, I never thought I’d hear this news.
18. January, 2008 at 7:07 am
Great! I’m just wandering how did they discovered it (I mean stpeter, Kev and so)
18. January, 2008 at 7:42 am
Too bad I don’t have any AIM/ICQ contacts
18. January, 2008 at 2:05 pm
It seems like the major websites are all starting open source technologies, including yahoo and google, i found a blog for all the sites that have started using open soruce, http://www.opentopix.com/topic/tech-news/aol-adopting-xmpp-aka-jabber
18. January, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Finally, people are getting the brain to work back.
18. January, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Will it be possible to send messages to icq contacts from another jabber server?
18. January, 2008 at 3:01 pm
wait… icq still exists?
18. January, 2008 at 3:21 pm
It was always possible to add ICQ contacts over a Jabber server if the server supported an ICQ transport (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabber-Transport). But its good to see AOL offering it!
18. January, 2008 at 3:23 pm
Hi.
THX for the info
Anyone else getting warnings about self signed certificate?
fingerprint:
C8:99:FA:40:54:CC:0E:58:C9:BD:2B:AE:B6:47:65:A8:61:61:7E:7F
18. January, 2008 at 3:35 pm
pidgin work fine! http://pidgin.im
18. January, 2008 at 4:35 pm
sameplace.cc work better…
18. January, 2008 at 6:09 pm
Before you declare Mission Accomplished! – there seems to be a sip.oscar.aol.com, and my SIP client can connect there as well.
18. January, 2008 at 7:13 pm
seems like this is what we are seeing here:
http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=Static&d1=dev&d2=assembly&d3=det_aolXmppGateway
18. January, 2008 at 8:35 pm
The roster items that are being returned are not valid.
<item xmlns=”" jid=”…
the empty namespace will break clients that are namespace correct.
18. January, 2008 at 9:05 pm
Hmmm… that topcoder.com website refers to a competition that occurred back in late *2006*. Has this gateway in fact been around since then?
18. January, 2008 at 9:47 pm
Cyrillic don’t work.
I can’t receive cyrrilic (russian) messages!
Привет!!!
18. January, 2008 at 10:02 pm
Pidgin works too.
18. January, 2008 at 11:29 pm
Hey Flo,
Thanks for blogging about our commitment to openness. We’ve been working
really hard over the past few years in making all of our services more
open and standards based, working with the SIP as well as the
Jabber/XMPP communities. Our XMPP gateway at xmpp.oscar.aol.com, which
we’ve been working on for a while now, is just one approach we’re
tinkering with. As you pointed out, though, this particular server at
xmpp.oscar.aol.com is a test server, so I wouldn’t count on it being
reliable or even continuously available until we put some more work into
it to bring it up to our standards.
In the meantime, keep your eyes open for more announcements from us
soon. We’re excited by the work we’re doing and the support we’ve
received from the broader internet community and hope you’ll be just as
excited by what we’ve got to offer.
-Edwin Aoki
-Technology Fellow/Lead Architect, AOL Products
18. January, 2008 at 11:35 pm
Dear Edwin Aoki,
thank you for posting here. It’s great to hear from someone like AOL that they are interested in working with Open Standards. I think that with XMPP you have made a wise choice, and it would be nice to see that AOL might even make some of their code open-source?
Thanks again,
Florian Jensen
18. January, 2008 at 11:51 pm
What would also be great would be support for syndication (which is reported not to be currently supported on that test server), to allow interoperability both with other large networks like Google Talk and with many small Jabber servers.
19. January, 2008 at 12:35 am
Now if they all added a unified SIP infrastructure for voice/video, we could all ditch proprietary skype for something open standards and interoperable.
19. January, 2008 at 4:53 am
>we could all ditch proprietary skype
Not necessary. Skype just will be the next who will join (or will be forced to join) to the XMPP
19. January, 2008 at 4:54 am
In the Jabber World, Jingle, used by Google Talk’s voice chat as well as others, seems to be more promising that integrating SIP, though interoperability between SIP and Jingle is possible.
19. January, 2008 at 11:27 am
@Nekuia: not so fast. SASL support, needed for connecting to xmpp.oscar.aol.com, will be in SamePlace starting from 0.9 (current is 0.8). Thanks for the mention, though.
19. January, 2008 at 5:44 pm
*wondering
19. January, 2008 at 6:46 pm
good news !
20. January, 2008 at 1:02 am
mmm… in pidgin, what do i write in Resource field? like UIN@xmpp.oscar.aol.com/blahblah
now this blahblah is the value of the Resource field, and i just can’t figure out what it is… could anyone enlightenment please? tnx
20. January, 2008 at 2:47 am
@ Kevin: Don’t you mean Federation? And yes, I agree, if AOL could create federation so that any XMPP-server could speak to it, I for one would be very happy. It’d eliminate the need for ICQ and AIM transports completely.
Still, even this is a huge step towards interoperability. Not quite there yet, but thank you Edwin for you and your team’s hard work! I hope we’ll see a federated 2008!
Now, if only MSN and Yahoo would go the same path…
Sergiu: Resources are a bit hard to explain… Since you can be logged in with multiple clients, each client has a separate resource. I usually put my host name in there, or the place I am currently (on my desktop computer I use ‘home desktop’ and on my laptop I use ‘laptop’ etc).
20. January, 2008 at 2:51 am
okay…its been 2 days and ive tried everything to get pidgin to connect to my AIM account via XMPP
ive tried suggestions from a variety of websites, including this: http://wiki.jabber.org/index.php/AOL_Alpha
…but nothing seems to work. can anyone help me out on this?
20. January, 2008 at 2:55 am
Hey echohead,
I tried to connect today, but I was unable to. I think the server is hopelessly overloaded. As Edwin Aoki said, it’s just a small test server. Now think of just all the digg users connecting to it. It won’t be able to handle them, if it is just a small test machine. I am sure it will be back in a few days / weeks though.
Greets,
Florian
20. January, 2008 at 6:34 pm
@Edwin Aoki
Does this mean that Aol Users will finally be able to contact gtalk and livejournal users
and maybe even use gateways
20. January, 2008 at 10:39 pm
Hey,
the theme shown on the screenshot is very nice! It think, it’s kde, right? But which theme (where can I found it?) and what else are done, get a look like this?
prodigy7
23. January, 2008 at 11:50 pm
And just a year ago everyone doubted unified communications.. this move by AOL is definitely towards more convergence of IM. The future steps are for multi-session too. Log into more than one profile, and conference between multiple protocols.
http://digg.com/linux_unix/mCUE_Unified_Communications_Software_Lands_First_on_Linux
The server-side translation is good.. what we really want are all-encompassing clients that allow us to use IM/voice the way we should be able to (browse and start talking rather than worry about which client, protocol, which address or number, etc).
21. February, 2008 at 8:12 pm
Unfortunately I can’t get it to work in Adium, but It’s possible that the overload of the server is the reason… I hope so!
I’m trying to get Jabber to the people in my home country, Luxembourg, but it’s not that easy
26. February, 2008 at 9:52 am
Is this server working now..? when can we expect the official release of aol xmpp server ?
9. March, 2008 at 9:49 pm
Good question. And I have no idea
9. March, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Yawn. Wake me up when we can add existing AIM contacts as jabber contacts (i.e., when AOL federates their messaging). Yet another way to login to AIM doesn’t help me at all.
22. April, 2008 at 1:27 am
I can’t get this to work with Pidgin…
Also, can i add my aim contacts to another Jabber account, GTalk, for example.
Is it a problem that my AIM screen name is my email address (it has an @ symbol in it).
Thanks
29. January, 2009 at 12:26 pm
I downloaded one of the XMPP Client library from http://code.google.com/p/jaxl but it is unable to authenticate with the given server settings. Is it still working?
29. January, 2009 at 12:36 pm
No, I don’t think so. But it would be nice if other networks would finally start doing something like this too.
29. January, 2009 at 8:38 pm
wat crap, just wondering why don’t all chat servers start using XMPP…lets pray we see that day soon
25. March, 2009 at 10:00 pm
Wake me up when we can add existing AIM contacts as jabber contacts (i.e., when AOL federates their messaging resimler Yet another way to login to AIM doesn’t help me at all.
Trackbacks
27. January, 2009 at 9:51 pm
3. February, 2009 at 11:56 am
10. February, 2009 at 2:17 am
11. February, 2009 at 2:29 am
6. January, 2010 at 10:32 pm
17. February, 2010 at 12:31 am
23. February, 2010 at 7:33 pm