AOL (well, AOL as assignee, the inventors worked for Mirabilis) has been granted a Patent 6,449,344 in the US for the essentials of the ICQ (and by extension AIM) messaging system.
An interesting development. News.com has a bit about it as well.
While it seems pretty broad (and thus I would wonder about the enforcability), it brings back memories of late nights on our own invention documentation.
Ah, youth (he said, aged after a three year gap)...
Do you part to try to get AOL's patent on Instant Messaging invalidated! Any true Internet geek knows that IRC was the originator in the Instant Messaging game, not ICQ!
Posted by: Stop AOL on December 18, 2002 04:31 PM» The user chooses his "home address" which is a server probably in the vicinity
. This server is the place where he announces his existence and which workstatio
n & port number he is actually on. Pending notifications can be handled then. So
a user can have an URL, like this: psyc://psyc.site.edu/~lynx/ «
I wrote that in 1994. It describes the concept of
having an address independent from the current
location of the communication client. I envisioned
the use of URLs like IM systems still haven't
managed to do. See also the 1994 PSYC spec:
http://psyc.pages.de/94/psyc.html
So this is my very late YAC2F (yet another
claim to fame)
By the way.. http://psyc.pages.de/ is at version
0.99 now and really really cool. Try it out. :)
Cheers...
(and yes, I agree that IRC essentially gave
us the same thing with /notify, back then
when nicknames and THE network was reliable)