Internet chat is compelling enough to overcome the fact that there are "four solitudes" of proprietary standards: AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, and ICQ. Unlike the Web or email, there are no open Internet standards for chat, resulting in a situation that is something akin to having four separate telephone systems that don't connect to one another.

Oddly enough, this hasn't limited the popularity of chat applications, with America Online's Instant Messenger being the big consumer choice, ICQ the selection of those who might think of themselves as more tech savy, and Yahoo's chat with a significant following as well.

The problem, of course, is that anyone who really wants to be connected and available in all four services has to have four different clients open. All those open apps do use up resources; on top of a confusing interface, ICQ in particular seems to seems to leak memory all over the place. Technically, connecting to AOL's network should be simple enough, and building an application to access more than one chat network is possible. Attempts in 1999 by Microsoft to have their Messanger connect to AOL IM network resulted in a cat and mouse game of blocked access until Microsoft finally gave up. One has been forced to choose a favorite system, and this is exactly what leading IM network AOL wants.

The result for me was using all the chat clients a lot less, since it was something I should be able to have running in the background all the time. I might prefer ICQ, but my staff uses Yahoo! and our consultants use AOL.

Enter Trillian, a chat client that connects to the "big four," along with Internet Relay Chat (IRC). I've been using for about a month, and in that time I have chatted more often and with more people than probably in all of the past six months combined. The interface is clean and easy to use, and Trillian's feature set and added functionalities are great, like the URL Grabber that keeps Web addresses people have IMed you.

So it should come as no shock that AOL has tried to block Trillian from accessing its network. The makers of Trillian, Cerulean Studios, has released two upgrades in as many days to regain access to AOL; as of this writing, I can still connect to AOL IM through the software.

The problem, of course, is that chat was allowed to become a proprietary protocol. There should be an open standard for chat, just like there is for Web and email, allowing the various clients to fight it out based on feature set and reliability. When AOL merged with Time-Warner, there should have been a requirement that they open up their network, but the US Federal Trade Commission did nothing.