MSN's New Instant Messenger Draws AOL Fire

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July 27, 1999 (12:00 AM EDT)

By Serdar Yegulalp,

One of the hottest new applications for the Internet, instant messaging, appears to be the battleground for a war of sorts between two major Internet players: Microsoft -- in the form of the Microsoft Network (MSN)-- and America Online.

Last week, MSN introduced its new MSN Messenger program, the latest in a slew of Internet instant-messaging programs such as AOL's Instant Messenger (AIM), Yahoo Pager, and ICQ.

But MSN Messenger featured two additional wrinkles that sent AOL execs into a tizzy : The MSN Messenger could import AOL buddy lists, and it could connect to the AIM service and interoperate with it -- letting MSN users send and receive messages from AIM users.

AOL moved swiftly to condemn MSN's actions. Ann Brackbill, the senior vice president for communications at AOL, went so far as to say it was "akin to hacking" -- criticizing the fact the MSN program openly asks users for their AIM user name and password, something AOL staffers consider a violation of privacy. Microsoft said the acquired password is not used for anything except accessing AIM services.

Reverse-engineering the AIM service isn't an unprecedented maneuver. Yahoo's Pager, for instance, was developed using the publicly posted Unix protocols for AIM, available freely from AOL's site. Open-sourced clients for AIM, running on Unix and BeOS, have been available for quite some time. But AOL has reworked its protocols to prevent MSN's and Yahoo's instant-messenger programs from accessing AIM, and the open-protocol information disappeared from AOL's site in the past couple of weeks. (Microsoft has, in the past, pushed for industry-standard protocols for messenger programs, and while AOL echoed the sentiment in public statements, no decisions were made.)

AOL has also stated its plans to continue monitoring MSN's actions, and to block what the company considers unauthorized use of its services. On Monday, a new version of the MSNMessenger program appeared, but AOL worked swiftly to ensure this version would also be blocked from accessing AIM as well.

AOL's swift action against MSN is a direct reflection of its serious intentions when it comes to instant messaging: Last year, AOL paid upward of $300 million for ICQ.