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IM Madness, or, Leveraging Ubiquity

OK, first of all, I'm not an idiot (or, a complete idiot...depends on your perspective).

I understand the underlying reason behind the lack of IM (instant messaging) - money. Whoever controls the IM tools (server & client) can control what it does. What it does, ultimately, is provide a revenue stream for AOL, MSN, Yahoo! and so on.

OK, I get that.

But I still don't get why this ubiquitous, Internet-only tool is proprietary.

The Net is all about interoperability (yeah, Longhorn and zillions of other examples nonwithstanding).

I remember the first online providers, such as Prodigy. Prodigy was a tool that works much like today's IM tools in that it was closed. Sure, it mimicked some Internet functionality, but - in the end - it was a closed loop. Sure, you could e-mail...but only to another Prodigy member. Your friend/mother/spouse on another system - such as CompuServe? Suck it up and get accounts on each, or forget about e-mailing them.

And if you did suck it up and get two accounts, that's two dial-ins. And so on.

Sheer madness!

Today, such a notion would be laughed out of a business development meeting. You can only e-mail people who are also on Earthlink? Surely you jest, and stop calling me Shirley...

So why do we accept it for IM?

Mainly because we have no choice, and because IM is not (yet) an enterprise-necessary tool like e-mail, so the outcry and potential solutions come from the tattered masses, not from the Suits in the Boardroom.

But at some point, someone is going to say enough is enough - how it will be handled will be the killer app, but the decision will come down is that messaging is a key Internet tool, and how you add on to the protocol is your call, but everyone's IM should be able to at least "text message" any other. (Yes, all sorts of buddy list questions and so on, but bear with me...).

In other words, someone/some company is going to figure out - or, if a government, say, mandate - how to get all these tools talking to each other, at some base level. Sure, the problems are huge, but - at the simplest level - the issues are not technological issues, they are business issues. Example questions/scenarios:

• How do you get an AOL (for example) to open their network and lose that ad revenue?


• Who gets to set the framework for how the Open IM works?


• Will this be a new standard, or will it be the same? If the former, backward compatible?


• What - if anything - does this mean for phone text messaging? Or other non-PC uses (car?)

And so on.

Basically, someone is going to get rich (or, at least moderately famous in some tech circles) figuring out how to leverage the ubuqitious nature of IM.

The same is really true of a lot of tools we use every day.

Doubt it?

OK, let's take e-mail as an example of something that has had the potential of its ubiquity tapped. I.e. I have e-mails from numerous e-mail servers funneled into one e-mail client, not one for each.

So why do I:

• Have a separate favorites/bookmarks list for each browser? (Sure, you can import them, but why not have ONE file that serves all browsers


• Ditto for passwords and so on - yes, there are tools for this sort of thing, including those built into (EACH) browser - but this is for geeks only. So there goes the ubiqutious factor.


• The whole issue of RSS and aggregators and so on is due for a serious shake out. While you could argue that a RSS feed is just like a Web page, it's something a user has requested in some fashion, then why do I (currently) have to use a different app? Some consolidation is needed to leverage this powerful tool.

There are more such examples; see if you can find some yourself.

It's just interesting to me. I wish I had the solutions to these problems; I don't. But that doesn't keep me from wondering about them.