• Recommend:
• 0 Comments

Microsoft Debuts IM-Compatible Chat

MSN Messenger service can chat with AOL's Instant Messenger.

By Tom Spring, PCWorld   

MSN Messenger will work with America Online's Instant Messenger, so you can chat with any of the 40 million registered users of AOL's service. Microsoft says that it will tightly integrate the MSN Messenger with its free e-mail service Hotmail. Its 40 million Hotmail members will be able to use the same log-on names and passwords for MSN Messenger as for Hotmail.

MSN Messenger will notify you of new Hotmail messages, and will let you search for and add contacts from either MSN Hotmail or AOL Instant Messenger, according to Microsoft representatives.

The MSN Messenger Service client is available Thursday for downloading, according to Microsoft. It has been in preparation for nearly one year.

Playing Catch-Up

For its part, Microsoft is late to the game of offering an instant messenger client on its MSN network. Nearly all of its portal adversaries offer a messaging client. The application class has seen juggernaut growth over the last year.

Between 30 million and 40 million users have downloaded AOL's competing ICQ messaging software, AOL reports. Chat software is also popular with Yahoo and Excite users. Each of the portals offer similar types of instant messaging programs. However, none of these clients adhere to open standards that let the several chat programs work together.

Microsoft is working with other leading Internet messaging companies to support the standard instant messaging and presence protocols, company representatives say. Adopting a standard would let people use any messaging application to communicate with members of any service.

To entice Internet users to download the tidy 350KB messenger, Microsoft is announcing a sweepstakes with daily prizes of $5,000 and a grand prize of $10,000. Anyone who downloads the MSN Messenger Service client at the product home page is eligible to win.