Switching between X

[David Woolley]

John Bailey wrote:
> On 09/14/2010 10:22 PM, Evan Platt wrote:
>> You can't - AFAIK, chat to a X account from a Y account - ie log into
>> AIM and chat to a Yahoo Messenger Account.
>>
>> They're completely different services, servers, etc.
> 
> In general, this is correct.  There are some exceptions:
>   * AIM and ICQ are completely interoperable.

Even then, the exceptions are the result of things done by the service, 
not things done by Pidgin.

Most services compete based on the number of people reachable through 
them, so don't want to give smaller services access to their users. 
This is a very commercial position and tends to be a short term.  For 
example, email really took off with the introduction of the internet, 
where everyone could talk to everyone.  X.400 had lots of fragmented 
islands that either could not talk to each other, or for which you had 
to pay extra to do so.

Decentralisation of ownership was one of the things that drove internet 
email, but the popular IM services are all very centralised.

-- 
David Woolley
Emails are not formal business letters, whatever businesses may want.
RFC1855 says there should be an address here, but, in a world of spam,
that is no longer good advice, as archive address hiding may not work.