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silverly submitted a story about the internal battles that ensued when MSN implemented its messenger service and tried to make it interop with AOL's instant message application, AIM. If you've ever tried to write a device driver, or reverse engineer a protocol, you'll feel right at home. This goes back to the tme when 'social media' referred to MSN and AIM, and the article covers all of the tricks that they tried to pull on each other in order to achieve and maintain market dominance. It is a long read, but some will find it of interest. It will not, however, be to everyone's taste.

Adam Ferris, a programmer from Microsoft, wrote this essay on tactics that Microsoft and AOL used to force users to use their chat service and keep them:

Some protocols, like HTTP and TCP/IP, are public, documented, and spoken by everyone, but some are private/proprietary and undocumented. AIM's protocol, known as OSCAR (for Open System for CommunicAtion in Realtime), was in the latter group. I didn't have the "key" to decode it. But what my boss and I could do was sign up for an AIM account and then watch the communications between the AIM client and the server using a network monitor, a development tool used to track network communications in and out of a computer. That way we could see the protocol that AIM was using to send the messages.

Much of the message was opaque, but in the middle was one of my text messages. "Hi... Anybody?" I would write into my AIM chat box and press return, and then on my network trace I would see my "Hi... Anybody?" Some of the protocol was always changing, but some was always the same. Our client [MSN Messenger] took the surrounding boilerplate and packaged up text messages in it, then sent it to the AOL servers. Did AOL notice that there were some odd messages heading their way from Redmond? Probably not. They had a hundred million users, and after all I was using their own protocol.