Are you people keeping up with the AOL/Trillian issue?

Hehe, I love trillian. I noticed AIM stopped working the other week and read about it, but the new version seems to work fine - so far. It's a great idea to have one client for all those messaging systems. Im confident about they beeing able to bypass any protection AOL puts up, but I guess that lawyers can stop them fairly easy, or havent AOL tried that yet?

/Fredrik - "chaotic se" on AIM.

AOL hasn't tried it yet, and since Trilian doesn't have the money to go through a court case, they would have to capitulate.

What's Trillian?

j/k I don't care I use ICQ and MSN.. AOL can go to hell for all I care.

Someone please explain to me just who/what Trillian is and why they would be hacking (into?) their
system? Some reference was made to SPAM, to which I am totally opposed. The way you said this it
sounds like Trillian is using mail server user lists to generate SPAM address lists. Is this
correct? If so, it would seem that even MSN is exposed to this kind of abuse.

Cari,

Do you have a link to an online news article?

Trillian, what I think it is, puts together AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo messanger, all in one program

From what I understand, Trillian does not 'hack' into other messaging systems. It does use knowledge of the way other messaging systems work to allow itself to appear on those systems as if it was part of them.
It's a lovely advancement to the messaging world and now allows a single program to be part of ALL messaging networks.
It will be interesting if it goes to court. I don't believe Trillian is doing anything illegal, but it may have required intimite information of other network systems (perhaps acquired illegally) to work. AOL however runs a major risk of breaching monopoly and competition laws if Trillian are not doing anything illegal.
I look forward to further skirmishes.

Paul.

Mmm well, since it's rather easy to use a sniffer to see what an AIM client sends and recieves, I belíeve that they need to change the whole messenging system so it's encrypted or so to stop trillian. And I doubt that they'll do that since it's gonna disallow all old clients from talking to the AIM system.

Trillian won't be able to go to court. It's made by two programmers and it's freeware. They ask for donations, but only about 1/1000 users ever donate anything.

Trillian does not SPAM, AOL was just using it as an excuse to block out Trillian. It does block all those stupid adds that AOL puts in its messenger. (One of the reasons that AOL is pissed.)

Here's the link to the zdnet article...yesterday the forum was down for overhaul and I wasn't able to see the discussion.

http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2844439,00.html

Good article, however - I didnt like his negativity. :notsure:
I really like Trillian and would like to continue use it. I'd prolly pay for it if I had to...that good is it, IMO.

I'm a great fan of Trillian. Instead of having one application for each of ICQ, IRC, MS Messenger and AIM, you only have one - Trillian..

So Trillian is a shell above the lower level messaging functions. This is an enhancement not provided by AOL,
MSN, etc. I think AOL should be careful about trying to attack Trillian in a legal manner. There are too
many examples of one product adding a higher level shell over another group of products that have been
supported in the courts. Examples? Try IBM's DB2 and the simplification tolls by such companies as "Candle".
IBM's policy is that if a customer uses a higher level tool that gets into the IBM code through inappropriate
means is at risk if IBM needs to change it. This seems to have worked to force other companies to work with
IBM to establish the interfaces that these companies need without being impacted by IBM's upgrades (at least,
to a large extent).

If AOL and Trillian are smart, they will find a way to work together, instead of against each other. Users of
Trillian might just possibly get them to see this by employing a communication blitz.

Cheers,
Jack

Sorry for the typo in my prevous post.

"simplification tolls by such" should read: "simplification tools by such".

Cheers,
Jack

I was talking about this with our sales exec yesterday and he was saying that this is more of an issue because of Microsoft's attempt last summer to allow MSN users to chat with AIM users. Larry pointed out that Trillian blocks ads from AIM (and MSN would have too).

In my opinion, the IM developers should allow all IM users to chat with each other, and worry about making a better product than their competitors rather than denying users a service.

I donated to Trillian twice, I liked it so much. Once when I first got it, and the second time when .70 came out. I would have paid for a version of AIM that allowed me to talk to my friends on ICQ and MSN and blocked ads.

The problem I see here, is that those IMs are handled by AOL, and therefore cost AOL. Trollian practically uses an infrastructure that AOL pays for, like a parasite.
The idea to use only one IM service is nice, but someone has to pay for the infrastructure. AIM finances its infrastructure through advertisement.
Trillian now uses something AOL pays for without permission, inflicting signifficant costs for AOL. I'd say AOL has a valid case.
I doubt AOL would have any problems with Trillian if they'd 'pay' for their use of AOL infrastructure by displaying the advertisement.

Of course I might misunderstand exactly how the system works ...

In that respect, they are parasites. But the people who connect to AIM through Trillian would be using AIM anyway if they weren't using Trillian, so it's not like they're adding extra traffic to the servers.

The thing that's bugging AOL is that there's millions of users NOT seeing those ads on AIM (and ICQ now, too, I believe). Those ads are significant source of income for them. That's the only way that they would be losing money.

A lot of people would probably stop using Trilian if they started having ads. There's a bunch of other programs like it on download.com. I don't know if any others are skinnable or not.

I think that AOL, rather than constantly battling with programs like Trillian and MSN should look at other ways to get money from their IM programs. Whatever happened to trying to make a better product than your competitor?

So, how many people pay any attention to the ads anyway? I would think ineffective
advertising would die a natural death. :VOMIT:

Cheers,
Jack

Yeah, if the only attention that you pay to ads is to close the window as soon as it pops up because you're sick of ads, they're not effective. I don't think that a lot of companies have figured out that pop up ads just annoy the hell out of most users...

I think that advertising companies should re-think the way they advertise their products. Basically anything that is intrusive annoys you. I liked how in the movie The Truman Show, they did ads right in the middle of the show.

depending on how this trillian works, they could be brought up on charges of 'theft of services' if the message traffic travels through the aol network without permission then this could be valid.

on another note, did not AOL do the same thing to ICQ a couple years ago?

Umm....I'm not sure about ICQ. They did it to MSN this past summer.