Multiprotocol instant messaging application
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A multiprotocol instant messaging application is software which allows one instant messenger (IM) client to connect to multiple IM networks particularlly AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, ICQ and Yahoo! Messenger but also some less well known ones including Novell GroupWise, Rendezvous, or Jabber networks. Some also support IRC though this isn't really designed to be an instant messenger network (in particular most irc networks do not give a strong assurance that the person using a nick is always going to be the same person)
The major instant messaging networks have in the past been rather hostile towards multiprotocol clients breaking them through small protocol changes. At one stage Trillian developers team was making a release every few days since AOL changed their servers frequently to break them. However as of June 2006 there has been no such breakage for over 2 years.
Examples of multi-protocol IM clients include Gaim (multi-platform), Trillian (perhaps the most widely-used), Miranda IM and Instan-t (for Windows), Kopete (for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems running KDE), PlanetaMessenger.org (for Java Platform), Agile Messenger for mobile telephones and PDA's running Windows Mobile or Symbian, Adium and Proteus for the Apple Mac and the location-aware Meetro for Windows XP.
Jabber brought with it the idea of gateways. In this system connections to the closed IM networks would be handled by a gateway on the users Jabber server, while Jabber users could talk to each other directly. This seems to function well for users running a private Jabber server, but large public Jabber servers often become the subject of IP blocks from the large networks.
[edit] See also
Recently, a web based multiprotocol instant messenger was released called Meebo. Meebo was designed using AJAX and supports Icq, Aim, Msn & Yahoo messenger protocols.
