It's a good day for open standards; firstly, Yahoo (partly) embraces OpenID and Microsoft commit to opening their document formats, and now AOL are moving AIM and ICQ to the XMPP protocol. They now have an experimental XMPP server at xmpp.oscar.aol.com, with usernames being the user's AIM ID or ICQ number followed by @aol.com. They also seem to have a SIP server at sip.oscar.aol.com. Could this be the end of proprietary, locked-in IM networks and the start of an age in which IM is a commodity service, running on open standards, much like email?

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