America Online and Microsoft are lining up allies in their ongoing instant messaging war.
A posse of AOL competitors, including Excite, Tribal Voice, Prodigy, Yahoo, AT&T, and Infoseek, joined Microsoft in asking AOL to drop its blockade of non-AOL users and sit down to discuss a cooperative resolution.
The letter, sent to AOL president and CEO Steve Case, praises AOL for leading the charge into instant messaging and for having purchased pioneer ICQ.
"But now is the time to unlock the broadest possibilities of this technology and the Internet by tearing down the walls between vendors so that all customers can talk to one another," the letter reads. "Certainly this is in our interests but it is also in the interests of our mutual customers."
Meanwhile, AOL has lined up staunch Microsoft foes Sun Microsystems, RealNetworks, Novell, and Apple to form an advisory group to set standards for instant messaging, AOL spokeswoman Ann Brackbill said.
AOL said Thursday that it would open the AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) to Apple. The two will work together to develop a compatible messaging client, although they haven't announced when the software will be available.
Microsoft launched the MSN Messenger client, which provided access to AOL customers, on 22 July, but by the end of the day AOL modified its servers and software to shut out MSN users.
When Microsoft released MSN Messenger, it simultaneously submitted its technology to the Internet Engineering Task Force as an open messaging standard.
Since then, the companies have been continually volleying back and forth, with Microsoft releasing patched versions of its software almost daily, only to have AOL rewrite its software that disables communications.
AOL claims that security concerns prevent it from allowing MSN Messenger clients to tap into AIM, which has 40 million users.
