Jabber

Matthew Hawkins matthew at topic.com.au
Wed Oct 17 16:59:44 EST 2001


On Wed, 17 Oct 2001, jeremy at itassist.net.au wrote:
> Most IM things are actually due to RFC 1459 being unworkable in today's
> environments.  It doesn't work through firewalls, it's vulnerable to
> netsplits, people with personality problems and badly written clients.

 * Nothing will work through a firewall (otherwise the firewall is hardly
   doing its job).

 * Anything on the internet is vulnerable to network interruptions, and
   that's hardly the fault (or in the scope) of any specific application.

 * People with personality disorders are problems no matter where they are.

 * Badly written software is a problem no matter what its for.

All these things affect ICQ also.

IRC has an open, standard protocol.  It is platform independent.  It
implements three levels of dealing with problem users (ICQ has one, and
it's extremely limited to the point of uselessness).  It has a
distributed network architecture for both load balancing and fault
tolerance.

> I rather liked ICQ - it sort of landed in the middle between email and
> IRC.  Now it has tried to expand to encompass both while stuffing ads
> into people's faces and as a result it sucks.

I always hated it.  It's a poor man's IRC which became popular on MS
Windows by internet newbies who thought this was a brand new cool thing
in 1996, not a poor implementation of something that had been around
since 1991 and at least had the decency to submit an RFC.

> In regards to the fact that ICQ support keeps breaking, it's because AOL
> keeps moving the goalposts, so the developers are always one step
> behind.

That's yet another reason why it should be eliminated.

-- 
Matt




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