A while ago, Robert Young had already predicted that the interoperability of instant messaging services with each other, and with the social networking sites, may lead to a quantum leap of filesharing potential:

“Most IM services are essentially P2P systems… not too dissimilar from the technologies behind Napster and KaZaA. In fact, most IM platforms allow file-sharing (albeit limited to your “buddy list”). And because those files do not go through a central server, they are essentially Darknets… under the radar of outside observers. But so far, the emphasis on the real-time, text-based communicative nature of IM has limited the damage that these networks could have on media companies (e.g. owners and aggregators of copyright). Now, however, if IM platforms morph into social networks, it’s quite possible the transition will unexpectedly unleash the next tidal wave of massive file-sharing … Social networking is all about self-expression. And for most, showing the world which music and videos you like is a big part of demonstrating who you are as an individual. In fact, social networks are proving to be a highly useful resource for the discovery and recommendation of all sorts of art forms and cultural products. But instead of simply declaring what you like, social networks turbo-charged with P2P capabilities will allow users to actually share. Compound this with the fact that social networks overlap… what I call the “Venns effect” (as in Venn diagrams)… and any one person can effectively have access to thousands or even millions of other connected “friends” beyond their immediate social circle. So if all of a sudden, one-click file-sharing is added to this equation.”

Now, though they are still holdouts, major progress is being made in this area, as reported by Jason Kincaid in Techcrunch, who also gives a short history of the efforts:

“Historically, IM has existed on closed and proprietary systems, with dedicated clients that can only connect to a single network. For many years users with accounts on multiple networks (say, AOL and MSN), would have to keep multiple programs open, which ate up system resources and cluttered desktops. By 2000 a handful of clients emerged that would allow users to manage multiple IM accounts from a single program. These stayed largely under the radar until 2002, when a client called Trillian hit 1 million downloads (and then jumped to 5 million six months later).

Prompted by the application’s growing popularity and incensed by the fact that users no longer had to use its official client, AOL attempted to block Trillian in early 2002, though the application’s developers would release patches very quickly to un-break the service. Yahoo and MSN attempted to enact similar measures against third party clients with limited success, as their restrictions were quickly cracked.

Eventually the battles between third party IM clients and the networks died down to a simmer – third-party programs would rely on open-sourced plugins to access the chat networks, and would be quickly updated if anything broke. The networks seemed to gradually accept the fact that these clients would persist, but wouldn’t do anything to help get their workarounds to function correctly (and oftentimes advanced features like file transfer didn’t).

Finally, in 2006 some chinks started to appear in IM’s armor. Google launched Gtalk, a chat client built on the open standard Jabber protocol. Meebo, a popular web-based multi protocol client, launched at around the same time, and along with other clients encouraged sites to begin opening their protocols to third parties.

Gradually AOL’s AIM network began to get in on the action, first with Open AIM 1.0 (which really wasn’t open at all, as it was primarily concerned with plugins and status updates) and later in 2008 with Open AIM 2.0. The second iteration of Open AIM offers third party web services like Meebo and native clients like Adium a sanctioned way to access the network.

More recently, the social networks have also begun to also grant access to Meebo and some other third parties, though most of them aren’t quite open (at least not yet). MySpace worked with meebo to launch support in December, and the aforementioned Facebook support was added last week.

It’s clear that progress is being made, but there are still two major holdouts: Microsoft’s Window Live Messenger (AKA MSN) and Yahoo Messenger. The two networks have teamed to let their users talk to each other, but everyone else is out of luck.”