About one year ago or a little bit more there was some sort of instant messaging engines community whose more known members where Yahoo and Microsoft claiming to be wanting to develop an standard for cross-client instant messaging (i.e. be able to instat message to others wheter they use MSN, Yahoo or whatever other client). They also claimed that the biggest obstacle to developing such standard was AOL position to keep its client closed from others, and having inot account that AOL also owns ICQ such a task resulted futile without the cooperation of AOL.
Now, this piece of news can mean two things to me. 1) Since AOL is letting Apple use its technology, opening its AIM to abroad screen names (mac.com), this might mean this is the beginning of cross-client instant messaging which I think would be one of the biggest and greater news related to the Internet since a long long time, making IM as easy and universal to use as e-mail; 2) None of the above, Apple is just supporting AOL's monopolistic and narrowminded point of view about IM, which I would find rather sad: I want to be able to IM with users of windows, linux, iPaq, Dreamcast, mobile phones or whatever other new gadget appears in a near future and that will only be possible with a public, free and standarized protocol upon which all the important parties agree.
Let's hope it is the first meaning, although, quite honestly, I doubt it.