Alec Saunders on Instant Messaging Cold War
Alec has pulled a bunch of threads together -- Yahoo/MSN interop partnership and news that the Skype protocol has been broken by Chineses hackers -- and declared that we are in a instant messaging Cold War:
[from Detente in IM’s Cold War? -- Alec Saunders .LOG]So, we, as consumers and developers, are pawns in a turf war between entrenched interests. It’s IM’s cold war. Left to their own devices, the blocs in charge of the controlled economies of Soviet IM-istan will present us with a “unified” network which is more akin to the old Bell model, than anything represented by the values of the internet. The one player, Google, who has been open, has displayed such ineptitude at marketing their platform that nobody cares. XMPP, while technically interesting, has no momentum. Tieing GTalk to the XMPP platform was a poor choice.
It’s getting to the point that some, like Stowe Boyd, are calling for a regulator to step in.
Or, the alternative, which would be any of the major players -- AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, Skype, and, yes, even Google could do it potentially -- going fully open. Which is not just making their implementation open to plug-ins and providing APIs. No, they would have to create an interoperability clearing house, where any instant messaging network could plug in and federate generalized capabillities, like identity, presence, and communication channels. It would be simple to get it going by demonstrating open interop between, for example, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Jabber. If Yahoo and Microsoft are really serious about open interoperability, then they should open the mechanism they have contrived for their partnership, and invite the other majors in, and sit down to hammer out the myriad business and technical issues involved.
If Gates wants to be a great philanthropist, dedicating billions toward solving the world's ills, he doesn't have to battle mosquito-borne disease in equitorial Africa: he could simply call for a global agreement on instant messaging interoperability, as I have handwaved, and invite the necessary players to sit down, and solve this problem, for the good of all humankind. It's not likely to win him a Nobel Peace Prize, but it would be a truly great step forward.
And it could make money all around. I for one would be willing to start paying for instant messaging services if they actually worked, allowed me to connect with anyone anywhere, and integrated in obvious ways with phone service. Get with it! Billions could be made! "You want interoperability on your Yahoo Messenger? Ok, but that costs $5.95 baseline a month, with a 2G ceiling on your pingwidth." Fine, sign me up. If I want free, in this new metered world, I would have to stick with non-interoperable standalone services, and who would accept that, in a connected world?
This would be true openness: not an attempt to gain the high ground by announcing that your IM network is "open" for developers to plug into, but opening up to the notion that all IM networks need to operate in a world where there are other networks. Don't get me wrong: there are issues that need to be resolved in such a scheme, such as network traffic, pingwidth, and a host of others. But these are exactly the issues that telephone companies handle now with their interconnections.
But I despair that these major players will take it all on willingly. Hence, the only answer to the Cold War is government intervention.
A bunch of hackers cracking Skype is just another Berlin airlift, and ultimately we will see Skype going through the same response that AOL, MSN, and Yahoo have. Leaving us... where, exactly? In a world where people use multi-headed clients as a patchwork response to the unwillingness of the IM networks to interoperate. Clearly the majors are hoping for a Betamax/VHS style resolution, with some tipping point that would cause the now stangant and fragmented marketplace to suddenly shift, and where some winner would gain hundreds of millions of new users at the expense of the others. With big money at stake, a win-win strategy has no chance. The only hope would be Mitt Romney or Hillary Clinton putting IM interoperability in their technology plank for the presidential race, which honestly, we should all be pushing for.
And of course, in the meantime, I am running Gizmo, Gtalk (in Gmail), iChat, and Yahoo Messenger on my desktop everyday.
Rock on, Stowe!
Posted by: Alec Saunders | July 14, 2006 at 08:01 AM