Google, Skype and the Future of IM

Matt Veenstra sent in a nice little piece of rumor mongering about how Google's new Talk/Jabber/IM thing is just a stepping stone, but it's really just a foreshadowing of their future buyout of Skype. Worth some thought anyway.

Comments

GoogleOS? YahooOS? MozillaOS? WebOS?

[huphtur]

Check out Kottke's article GoogleOS? YahooOS? MozillaOS? WebOS?. In which he speculates about the future of the WebOS.

Well, yeah.

[Ieshan]

If you send email to someone on gmail, or you IM someone who's using Google-Talk, sure, Google could have a copy of that.

But lets be realistic. Google probably doesn't want any information about *you*, they probably want to *aggregate information*, which is what they've been doing all along.

This is all an extension of search. Through all the "omg", "lol", and "haha"s in Instant Messenger, there's thousands of words that can be associated with both each other and with other links. There's thousands of white-listed and black-listed participants, because people naturally filter their conversations. They don't want a database about *you*, they want a relational database about *communication*, to make it easier to find out what someone means when they type something like "river bank" or "white house".

It's all about relationships between language. Conversation is a natural extension. They provide a service, they get tons of data.

At least, this is what I would be doing with the data. Google might not be doing that.

Yes we do

[10Ghz]

Open-source (it uses Jabber!) IM that is backed by Google? Yes please!

I don't know about you, but I want to have "one IM to rule them all" that is also open source. Jabber was the prime candidate, but it was rather minor when compared to MSN, AIM and the like. Not anymore. Google is about to increase the number of people using Jabber by order of magnitude!

With Google's help, we just might get an IM-infrastructure that is based on open source and open standards. No need to mess around with MSN and the like, just use Jabber. No need to work around proprietary protocols.

If Google manages to put VOIP in there as well, more power to them! Once system for all your IM'ing and VOIPping. Based on open standards. Based on open source. With millions of users. Yes please! No longer would we have to rely on Skype for clients and service. No longer would we have to worry when MS or AOL breaks our IM-clients with "updated" versions of their protocol.

Re:Yes we do

[earthbound kid]

I wish I had saved mod points today.

You're exactly right. IM today is like email in 1993. You can use FidoNet, AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, or this new fangled "internetwork" of Al Gore's, but there is no universal service. The difference is that the current blockade inter-service is fully self-imposed. In fact, AOL was order by the FTC to open up its service before offering voice or video chat as a condition for merge with Time-Warner, but then the government remembered that AOL is a big corporation, and rules don't apply to them. The only reason that we don't have interservice compatibility is because everyone is trying to hog the market to themselves. The loser here is the consumer. But, maybe, just maybe Google will help usher in a new age of IM interservice standards. Let's hope.

Re:Why would they buyout Skype?

[TheRaven64]

From what I have read, the Skype system works by using non-NAT'd people as relays for conversations where both end-points are NAT'd. This, unfortunately, is placing a lot of strain on their system as NAT'd people start to greatly outnumber non-NAT'd people. Of course, if we all had IPv6, this wouldn't be a problem.