[Gllug] AOL and AIM

[David Damerell]

On Monday, 3 Sep 2001, Alain Williams wrote:
>On Mon, Sep 03, 2001 at 04:53:02PM +0100, matthew at thenut.demon.co.uk wrote:
>> I got a message this morning, when I connected to AIM through jabber:
>> <AOLInstantMessenger> You have been disconnected from the AOL Instant
>> Message Service (SM) for accessing the AOL network using unauthorized
>> software.  You can download a FREE, fully featured, and authorized
>Sorry I'm not an IM fan so this may be naive:
>*Why* do they want you to use their s/ware ? Does it matter ?

It may be a side effect of the desire to prevent MSN Messenger from
using the AIM service.

It's better for AOL if people don't use clients that unify several
messaging services into one, because they want to control the market
(and also, presumably, offer paid services) and they can only do that
effectively if everyone uses their service (and once they get a bunch
of people on AIM, everyone will use AIM because everyone else does);
clients that allow you to use several messaging services in one
unified way are very bad for that.

-- 
David Damerell <damerell at chiark.greenend.org.uk> flcl?

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