Will Instant Messaging Ever Unite?

scallion writes "An article in Technology Review titled Getting AOL To Talk To MSN points out that currently the world of instant messaging is "as factionalized as Afghanistan," then asks, what will it take to unite all these individual IM networks under one umbrella?"

Comments

Re:it's called TRILLIAN!

[Trinition]

Trillian is only a temporary answer. Jabber could've been a better piece of the answer, but it got de-railed as far as IM interoperability. We truly need interoperable protocols. Or better yet, a standard protocol.

The road block to such a protocol, however, is AIM, and possibly the other IM providers. How do you get people to switch from one established, large IM provider such as AOL to a new protocol/provider? If you don't have interoperability (which AOL has demonstrate its resistance to in the past), you won't get people to switch.

Not gonna happen

[medcalf]

It seems to me that the ideal solution would be for everyone to agree on a single protocol. This will not happen. You see, it used to be that someone would come out with a protocol and client and server implementations, and would release them into the wild. Then, people would either use it (like IRC) or not (like UNIX's talk command). If they did, then other and better implementations would come out, as long as the protocol was solid. This is how email, FTP, HTTP and many other common Internet protocols were developed.

Now, though, companies create the protocols and allow them only to the chosen few who use their software (think AOL for IM and Real for streaming content). The protocol is not generally available, meaning better clients can't be made, and there is often a dependence upon resources wholly owned by a single company. Sometimes (again AOL and Real come to mind) these are genuinely useful. In that case, someone (another company, generally) will produce a competing product, that does the same thing in a different way.

Some people will choose one method and some will choose another. Users cannot force standardization. The corporate developers are being paid to enforce balkanization, rather than to work towards standardization. Independent developers cannot get enough of a critical mass to make it feasible for users to migrate to their systems, or for corporations to adopt the independent methods as a matter of convenience.

The net result, no pun intended, is that there is no way to move to a standard. This leaves us with the options of using a client which speaks all of the different protocols, choosing to pocket ourselves into a small part of the possible Internet community (with corresponding obeisance to the local corporate power), or choosing to cover our screen with all of the various blessed programs. Only a unified client holds any real appeal to me, and that is fraught with problems. For example, try talking to AIM when AOL keeps changing the way the servers work on the back end! It's a nontrivial problem.

So I guess the point I'm trying to make is that expecting a unified IM system to appear, just because it makes sense from a user perspective, is not very likely to be worth anyone's while.