Microsoft, Yahoo in IM deal; AOL going after everyone else

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In a move that is long overdue, the AP is reporting that Microsoft and Yahoo will finally make their IM services interoperable.

For its part, AOL recently began offering new deals to everyone else with AIM Presence, including bloggers and podcasters who want access to the service for non-commercial use and can now have it for free, and to social networking companies Facebook Inc., and LinkedIn Corp., as well as blogging software provider Six Apart, and Glam.com.

Perhaps it’s only fear of GoogleTalk (which is based on Jabber/XMPP) that has prompted this new found openness, but the fragmentation of IM services and the lack of open standards has been a huge disservice to the user community, and it is good to see it finally beginning to end.