RE: IETF-LA

Josh Cohen (joshco@microsoft.com)
Fri, 20 Mar 1998 13:06:44 -0800

One comment on the basis for PIP/RVP whatever.
AOL may be sitting back and waiting, but thats not
really the point, IMHO. The RVP effort to
standardize a 'chat' or 'buddy list' protocol is
directed against AOL's proprietary system. Much
of the momentum from RVP seems to have begun the
day Netscape announced a bundle of AOLs AIM software.
This bundle gives wide distribution to their
prorietary (and thus, evil) protocol, in a sense,
locking out the other players.

So, its no surprise that AOL isnt active, they
have no reason to be, and I havent seen any indication
that they are interested in being open in this space.

Of course, if RVP gets off the ground and becomes
widely deployed, I imagine AOL (and netscape) will
be forced by the market to support the new protocol.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jeff Bone [mailto:jbone@activerse.com]
> Sent: Friday, March 20, 1998 11:15 AM
> To: ejw@ics.uci.edu
> Cc: 'FoRK@xent.ics.uci.edu'
> Subject: Re: IETF-LA
>
>
>
>
> > > I'm there for the presence BOF & related discussions for
> the most part.
> >
> > In a nutshell, what is this activity about? Who are the players?
>
> We should probably take this discussion out of the list, but
> just in case anyone's
> interested I'll give a brief summary. The BOF I mentioned is
> listed as APP/pipr (Presence
> Information Protocol Requirements --- sic, it's supposed to
> be Presence Infrastructure
> Protocol.) This is the evolution of the RVP (Rendezvous
> Protocol) discussion. There's an
> immediate need among vendors of "buddy list" or presence
> applications to have some minimal
> level of interoperability --- there're something like 20-25M
> users of such products out
> there, and the landscape is extremely balkanized. Current
> protocols and proposals don't
> really address the problem correctly, though there are some
> longer-term proposals out
> there that begin to verge on solving it. What we need as a
> minimum is an interim
> solution; long term, extensions to HTTP *might* be the right
> answer. RVP and what it's
> evolving into (tentative name: PIP) are the current
> placeholder for that discussion. The
> players in the standards area are my company (Activerse,)
> Microsoft (of course,) and Lotus
> with draft submissions, and Sun and a handful of other folks
> participating at a high level
> on the mailing list. The other buddy list vendors (ichat,
> Mirabilis, AOL) seem to be
> taking a "wait and see" approach to standards at this time.
> I'd expect them to start
> participating more once this thing gets to working group.
>
>
> jb
>
>
>