The future of IM

So what with the Adium betas being out recently I've been giving a lot of thought to instant messaging in general, and in a wider context I've been thinking about online communication and how I see (or at least want to see) it progressing.

Let me take you back to the late nineties, when ICQ was king. ICQ was great in it heyday, better in concept I think than today's big three. ICQ was more than instant messaging, it was instant email. A hybrid of the two. When online you could talk live to people. When offline, the messages people sent you were saved for you to pick up when you came online. A few tweaks and it could have been a great alternative to ageing email. But alas, along came AOL and changed all that.

AOL's leading presence in the US online arena made AIM the de-facto instant messenger. Most people chose AOL as their service provider and so most people ended up with AIM on their computer. Therefore most people used AIM and the uber-geek users of ICQ had to make the move in order that they could talk to their non-geek friends.

In the rest of the world the market was picked up by Microsoft and Yahoo!, both offering instant messenger clients to complement their online services. I remember Hotmail's heavy advertising of this MSN Messenger thing. I had never been tempted to try it, IM was foreign to me, but one day I saw a pile of people using it at school and was awe-struck, "wow" I thought, "this is better than email."

So MSN was my first take on instant messaging. And, I guess it was the same for a lot of people. We all had Hotmail, so we all got MSN. I knew one guy who used all three clients and convinced me to give the other two a try, but I eventually ended up uninstalling because he was the only guy I knew who used them. Here in the UK, MSN remains the instant messaging protocol of choice.

Just recently Microsoft and Yahoo! have joined forces, at least in terms of IM, and are making their protocols interoperable. I've yet to see it work however. I tried this morning, but it was sketchy, neither client saw the other as online, and messages would only send from the Yahoo! client. Apparently it works best if you have an @msn.com or @hotmail.com email address. I don't, and couldn't be bothered to register one.

But it's great to hear that something is being done. This crazyness has gone on long enough. You don't see telecoms companies not allowing you to phone a customer of a rival network now do you? It just shouldn't work like this. And yes, there are the alternatives, Adium et al. But as great a piece of software Adium is, the client side multi-protocol solution is just not good enough.

And I don't think the shabby pasting together of Yahoo!/MSN, AOL/ICQ approach is going to work either. The differing protocols cause so many conflicts. For example, the Yahoo! protocol requires the registration of a Yahoo! ID whilst MSN uses your email address to log you in. In Windows Live Messenger you enter yahoo_id@yahoo.com to add a Yahoo! contact, but, what if this particular Yahoo! user has that Yahoo! email address registered as an Microsoft Passport? What happens then? Does Windows Live Messenger try to use the Yahoo! protocol or the MSN protocol?

Yahoo! and MSN probably aren't anywhere near able to integrate their voice and video systems, let alone file transfer, gaming, shared folders, avatars, display pictures, personal messages, emoticons and all the other proprietary goodies.

Google is on the right lines, using the open source Jabber protocol in its Google Talk instant messenger, and it's very nice to see a big company taking some initiative here, but, I don't think Google has a good shot at breaking the bond people have with their preferred instant messengers. After all, you use what the people around you use. No one here in the UK is going to use Google Talk, because MSN is already established.

So what needs to be done? Clearly there is a need for a set of open protocols which any service provider, be it AOL, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! or anyone else who wants to set up an IM service can use. A system not unlike Jabber's. Service providers would compete in terms of software ease-of-use, lack of advertising, disk space for email and other non-protocol-specific features.

But could this actually happen?

These being for-profit companies, they would surely never voluntarily open the protocols which tie users in. Instead we'll need international governments on board. If the US and EU governments started throwing hefty fines at this lot I think we'd begin to see it all open up before us. And let's face it, these proprietary protocols are basically monopolistic behaviour, locking consumers into one service.

Ultimately it would be best for the consumer and it really would just make sense.