IM Interop
Niall Kennedy has a post on existing and planned IM interop, between Yahoo and MSN, and upcoming integration between AOL and GTalk. I'd noticed the MSN option in the Yahoo! messenger beta, but haven't tried it. I use MSN mostly for work contacts (it's the de-facto NewsGator standard) and Yahoo! for other friends. I should probably try it out - Gaim is an acceptable client but I'd prefer to live in Yahoo! messenger. It's nice that Yahoo! and MSN are working together, but I wonder, what's in it for them? Niall's hypothesis (data exchange on user behavior) is plausible, especially given that Yahoo! and MSN are also-rans in the search space, but that seems like a very theoretical benefit at this point. It seems to me that MSN needs Yahoo! a lot more than the other way around. I know this is totally anecdotal, but of my non-professional contacts, very few use MSN. I have no idea what the actual market share is, or if it could be normalized to account for duplicate identites on each system.
To me, the interesting part is in merging AOL's traditional "stay away from our network" approach and Google's adoption of a wide-open standard (XMPP). You couldn't come up with two more different approaches. As a late arrival to the IM part, Google's approach makes a great deal of sense. Still, my sense is that the audiences are totally different - AIM is much more a less geeky crowd, while GTalk is the darling of the early adopter set. When the two networks are merged, will anybody on each side of the fence have anything to say to each other? This partnership does make some sense though - GTalk has much less penetration in IM than AIM, while AIM has lots of user data to potentially give to Google.