Friday 8 December 2006

Join the Federation

Lately I find myself thinking a lot about instant messaging and why we have so many different incompatible networks. Why should it be that way? What is standing in the way of instant messaging federation - turning all the networks into one?

Control. Each provider right now has total control of the network and that's going to be tough to give up.

Power. There's a certain political game going on where one network vies for bragging rights over another network based on various crowed features and statistics. In addition, they have the power to tweak the network and add features as they see fit without negotiating with anyone.

Fear. If we open up the network and let people choose how to connect, we may open the whole world up to spam like we've never seen before on instant messaging. That's one of the primary problems with email and it's caused by cheap inter-operable access and greed coupled with gullibility.

In counterpoint, what is there to gain?

A larger user base. If there was only one IM network (or seamless interaction between all of them) then the number of chat buddies available to any given user vastly expands. There's no buddy barrier - everyone is free to choose your program to access the network, even if their buddies all use another program.

Bragging rights. When people are free to choose any of hundreds of IM clients to access the network and they choose yours, that's worth bragging about. There was no vendor lock-in to force them and they came anyway. That's definite street cred.

Gratis protocols and servers. Instead of having to define, code and maintain a messaging protocol as well as the servers to provide it, you are free from this particular programming burden. You can still run your own server with your own back-end software on it, but you really don't have to. You can even contribute to the further development of the protocol if you like, because it would be open-source.

If you can email anyone on any provider from any other provider, you should be able to chat with them on IM too.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If email were like IM, Hotmail users couldn't send to GMail users.
PPS - All the barriers are artificial

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

In the new Windows Live Messenger, Microsoft and Yahoo! tried to join forces and build a compatibility between their networks, I tried it out and there was some sort of problem and I had to revert to the old MSN Messenger just so that I could connect to the network until I could figure out how to quit that trial feature

John said...

I heard about that crossover messaging deal, but I don't have anyone to try it with. It doesn't surprise me that there were problems with it.

Now if all the major players started supporting something like Jabber, we'd be set. As long as they do it properly.