I was reading the news that piled up over the last week or so, and found a couple of interesting articles that I wanted to share/discuss.
The first article is about AOL moving their next-generation AIM (aka Triton) out of beta status. I guess what I found most interesting is that it talks about their tabbed IMs and their improved file transfer support. Well gee AOL, welcome to the club (finally!). I'm actually more interested in the level of ads used in Triton vs. previous AOL clients, especially after the screenshots of ads being inserted inline into actual conversations. (See here.)
The other article was about Skype, and this article had multiple interesting facets to me. First, it was nice to see a company coming out and saying that their product/service is not right for a certain market segment (large business). On the other hand, many large businesses already block Skype due to its sometimes bandwidth-hogging nature, so I suppose they're not really saying anything new.
In the same article, I found this paragraph very interesting: "Microsoft Corp., which is making a push into the VOIP space, earlier this month came out with support for another approach to enable rich media, such as VOIP, to traverse NATs and firewalls: the ICE (Interactive Connectivity Establishment) methodology, a standard under consideration by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). ICE uses the STUN (Simple Traversal of UDP through NATs) and TURN (Traversal Using Relay NAT) IETF protocols." The STUN protocol is what BitWise just adopted (in the lastest 1.7 Beta) for automatic NAT traversal for UDP. Also, BitWise uses TCP NAT traversal where possible as well, which is both very cool and not very common. Now that's cutting edge. Too bad more routers don't support it!
In any event, it's cool to see a) AOL adding features BitWise has had for a while b) companies owning up to their own limitations, and c) that BitWise is adding some of the same new/current technologies along with the "big boys." A nice ending to a very nice, relaxing extended holiday weekend. :)