Re: AOL IM Traffic Statistics

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From: Adam Rifkin -4K (adam@XeNT.ics.uci.edu)
Date: Mon Jun 19 2000 - 18:51:13 PDT


Steve Williams wrote in http://www.xent.com/april00/1301.html :
> According to public AOL statements:
> 4 Million simultaneous users at peak
> 1 Billion IMs/day
> 2 MB/second = 173 GB/day = 20Mb+ avg. traffic, full duplex loading
> Extrapolating:
> Nearly 12000 IMs/sec, average. My heuristic for public Internet services is
> that peak is 4 times average.
> That's an average of 250 IMs/person per day!

250 IMs/person/day does sound implausible. I know how many messages I'm
sending on my several AIM accounts and it's not nearly this many combined.
Still, it gives us a benchmark of what the owner of The World's Most
Popular IM System believes.

Dan Kohn wrote:
> http://aim.aol.com/openim/

Wow. Aoki and Wick did a ton of work in writing this spec:

    http://aim.aol.com/openim/draft-aol-imx-00.txt

They have interesting company in the IMPP bakeoff...

    http://www.imppwg.org/proposals/index.html

...which range from the "rocket science" of Marshall Rose, Dave Crocker,
and Graham Kline

    http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-mrose-imxp-core-00.txt

...to the populism of Jeremie Miller's Jabber

    http://core.jabber.org/rfc/jabber.txt

...to a slew of documents promoting SIP as the answer. (What was the
question again?)

With eight proposals on the table, is the question now how to get these
to interoperate? (Actually, there are 9 proposals on the table if you
include Microsoft's RVP.)

Or is the question still, is IMPP worth doing at all?

With AOL and Microsoft officially supporting public specs, I do wonder
what the official corporate positions of IBM/Lotus, Yahoo, and
CMGi/TribalVoice are. Is this the Senate (one company, one vote) or the
house of representatives (the more users you have, the more you get to
dictate -- meaning everyone needs to listen to AOL)?

I did notice that AltaVista did some more chirping today.

> AltaVista Launches Instant Messaging Service
> Monday, June 19, 2000 06:20 PM
>
> PALO ALTO, Calif. (Dow Jones)--CMGI Inc.'s
> AltaVista Co. launched a text and voice instant messaging service
> designed to be compatible with all other Internet instant messenger
> services.
>
> In a press release Monday, the company said the service uses CMGI's
> Tribal Voice unit's PowWow technology, the same technology that powers
> Freeserve's Communicator and AT&T Worldnet IM Here service.
>
> A spokesman for Alta Vista wasn't immediately available to say whether
> its instant messaging service will work with America Online Inc.'s
> Instant Messenger and/or ICQ, both closed systems.
>
> Earlier Monday, America Online Inc. said it plans to
> start selling $250 television set-top boxes immediately that will let
> users chat and send instant messages while watching TV.
>
> The Journal reported June 14 that Federal Trade Commission
> investigators began inquiries about AOL's Instant Messenger in
> connection with the commissions anti-trust review of AOL's $113 buyout
> of Time Warner Inc.
>
> The Journal said that AOL's Instant Messenger and ICQ are closed
> systems that allow only registered users to communicate with each other;
> even the two systems are mutually exclusive.
>
> The Journal also said predictions about the growing importance of
> instant messaging have raised questions about the dominance of AOL,
> which has staved off encroachment from unlikely underdog Microsoft Corp.
>
> Though the Time Warner acquisition wouldn't add to AOL's instant
> messaging market share, The Journal said opening up the market to
> competition might become a condition of the merger.
>
> When reached for comment, a spokesman for CMGI's Tribal Voice said
> AltaVista Co.'s instant messaging service, though designed to be
> compatible with other Internet instant messenger services, will work
> with America Online's services only if AOL chooses to open its system.
>
> Notably, AltaVista's users will be able to exchange messages freely
> with users of Microsoft's open MSN Messenger Service, which is dueling
> with AOL for the coveted instant messaging market.

----
Adam@4K-Associates.Com

I'm a criminal Cuz everytime I write a rhyme These people think it's a crime to tell 'em what's on my mind -- Eminem, "Criminal"


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