CrossTalk: scalably interconnecting instant messaging networks

  • Authors:

  • Marti A. Motoyama;George Varghese

  • Affiliations:

  • University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA;University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2nd ACM workshop on Online social networks
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

We consider the problem of interconnecting a simple type of social network: Instant Messaging services. Today, users are members of various IM communities such as AOL, Yahoo, and MSN. Users often want to engage in conversations that span multiple IM communities, since their friends may use competing IM clients. While client-side solutions exist in the form of Trillian and Pidgin, they require multiple logins and offer a subset of the features present in official IM clients. We propose a different solution based on translating gateways that only requires a single login and allows users to keep their existing IM clients. We claim that such interconnection empowers users and encourages the development of third-party applications. We propose using an overlay of bypass gateways that avoids many of the scalability limitations of standard gateways. We argue that smaller IM networks have the right incentives to use these gateways, and larger networks cannot easily obstruct bypass gateways. Deploying these gateways into a system we call CrossTalk can ultimately aid in protocol standardization. We describe the architecture of bypass gateways and the implementation challenges faced in interconnecting MSN, AOL, Jabber and Yahoo for IM. We briefly discuss to extensions to other domains such as interconnecting SIP and Skype.