Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has made good on a promise made at the Build conference earlier this year, incorporating support for the open XMPP protocol into its Windows Messenger platform. This is a radical departure from a time not so long ago when the major instant-messaging networks from Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL would attempt to limit who connects to their network. Indeed, it devolved into a cat-and-mouse game at one stage with the proprietary protocols regularly changed or tweaked willy-nilly to throw off integration by third-party IM applications such as Trillian.

In a mid-week blog post, Dare Obasanjo, lead program manager for Microsoft's Live Connect Platform wrote: "With the release of the XMPP interface for Messenger, any XMPP-based chat client that can also support OAuth 2.0 for authentication will be able to connect to Windows Live Messenger to enable people to see which of their friends are online and chat with them in real time."

As pointed out by Stephen Shankland in a CNET News article, new communication methods such as Facebook and Twitter have since seized the spotlight, casting IM into the background. Alliances by some of the companies also proved incomplete, observed Shankland. This resulted in Yahoo Messenger users reaching Windows Live Messenger users, while Gmail Chat users could reach AOL Instant Messenger users.

Not everything is as open as it seems though, cautioned Ian Elliot of i-programmer. The implementation of the custom OAuth 2.0 layer, while not unreasonable, does necessitate developers having to sign up and obtain an application ID and access token. This means that Microsoft could conceivably refuse access in the future for arbitrary reasons, though, in all fairness that's not something that the company has a tendency to do.

For now, interested developers may want to check out code samples at github here.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at i-programmer
- check out this article at CNET News

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