Mashable - The Social Media Guide - Latest Comments in Want IM Conglomeration? I Sure Don’t.

Re: Want IM Conglomeration? I Sure Don’t.

bumbum506 — Sat, 02 May 2009 17:13:16 -0000

i enjoy, msn to im.

Re: Want IM Conglomeration? I Sure Don’t.

Burak — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 16:58:14 -0000

I agree. The basic IM function of having a text conversation with people should be interoperable, and it's technically feasible straight away. I don't see why this would put an end to innovation.

Re: Want IM Conglomeration? I Sure Don’t.

Ize — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 06:50:09 -0000

will this work?

Re: Want IM Conglomeration? I Sure Don’t.

Brett — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 11:25:33 -0000

Gmail was also a big improvement because it grouped email conversations into threads. I think this was the key innovation. Remember when email conversations were segmented and interleaved through your inbox, and you had to correlate messages by Subject line?

Re: Want IM Conglomeration? I Sure Don’t.

Kyle Stone — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 04:17:42 -0000

The obvious point the author misses is that IM clients are utterly tangential to any of these companies' business models. For the same reasons Google, Yahoo, etc. do not give a damn about making the best email or chat client on the internet, many companies are simply no longer even considering building chat functionality into their sites (Facebook being the obvious, recent, and stupid exception here).

Look at it another way. Google's email system was only an improvement over others because it offered an incredible storage capacity in relation to other providers. This innovation fundamentally changed the way that people used email. Every major email provider has caught up. So why not establish cross-compatibility?

Kyle Stone,
GovCentral.com Head Editor

Re: Want IM Conglomeration? I Sure Don’t.

Brett — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 00:21:58 -0000

I'm not sure that's really an issue, given that clients need not always follow the same protocol in every circumstance. For instance, any given client should be able to support special features only for certain networks or only when the person on the other side is using a certain client.

If you want to differentiate your client and steal away users from other networks, here's a plan...

Step 1: Interoperate with other networks so people can try out your client without losing their contact list.
Step 2: Create special features that only work when both users are using your client.
Step 3: Cross your fingers and hope that these new users will encourage their friends on the other network to convert in order to use the new features.

Re: Want IM Conglomeration? I Sure Don’t.

mreider — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 18:36:52 -0000

The poor quality of this article detracts from the overall excellence of Mashable's content.

First of all, the debate over why IM platforms should inter-operate is over, and ended in the Internet's Mesozoic era (5/6 years ago). The strategy has been to innovate around your own IM platform, as a preferable alternative to the baseline features offered by everyone else. Keep it open to lure the masses, but make it better to keep them.

Secondly, and unhandsomely, the article suffers familiar quasi-economic foolery. To apply the axiom "competition = good" to any, and every market situation is simple-minded at best, and ignores the complexity of every situation's context. Reminds me of the political rhetoric in "tax cuts vs. social programs." There's nothing intrinsically bad or good about either one of them. 100% situational.

Re: Want IM Conglomeration? I Sure Don’t.

Adam Posey — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 16:54:51 -0000

Standardizing communications and such, I would say, increases the need to compete. When there are standards, tiny players can grow exceedingly fast to compete with larger, more established, IM clients/networks.

Standards make adoption easier too, each client is going to push it's own feature set and options and so forth to get people to adopt, but removing a HUGE barrier to entry in the form of getting our friends to join that network will make it easier for client adoption to happen.

Re: Want IM Conglomeration? I Sure Don’t.

Axar — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 15:06:50 -0000

Hello,

I believe that greater interoperability will bring greater amount of competition to the space. Further I believe that the current "slower progress" you refer to is the result of lack of commitment on part of some of larger players in the space to push through a standard open-source interoperability platform for web social services.

Why does Yahoo, AOL, Google, MSN et. al., need to maintain and improve ever more complex set of communication protocols by themselves? Basic set should be standard. Further more the chat clients (or UX in user driven services) is the natural real estate battle ground â€“ it is always advantageous to innovate, improve and differentiate your client. For example having a Yahoo, AOL, or Google client (connected to everyone else) would make the difference to more advantageously serve Google vs. Yahoo vs. MSN services like (Search or News) and tools like Gears (and/vs. 3rd party). Aggregators (all for one clients) are welcome too - Google, Yahoo, AOL, MSN use social (chat) services now to service all serve all sorts of content, they still win even if itâ€™s a competitors client.

We have many real world friends who are not on our social network, and they should have to be â€“ to communicate with us. Yes, interoperability will cause a lot of similar services (chat, video or 3rd party app) to be supported by many more web companies. Which really would just increase the amount of content available to the end user. Communicating with all our friends would also increase the amount of use and number of types (chat, video, social network profile, etc) services which would be used. Look at the mobile communication space, originally you could only call within the Verizon network which received limited consumer support; then the networks allowed you to call anyone and anything â€“ and now the mobile phone is more widely adopted than the PC. Again same happened to SMS; and is happening to MMS; mobile internet, etc.

If there is a basic platform between all Web Social services companies, it would be like having a new layer on top of which additional applications can be build by 3rd party players â€“ just as they were for Windows back in the 90â€™s (only this time no one gets to own the â€œwindowsâ€). Competition wise currently we are stuck or the flood gates are still not fully open - because the big guys want to own the â€œwindowsâ€ or at least a piece a piece of it. This is due to the belief that they own the content on the network which leads to the illusion of control over the user base, users profile and usersâ€™ content which thus they now are trying to gate of and â€œprotectâ€.

It is an illusion because there is a real world social network and social graph which underwrites the Internet social graph and secondly because the user has the exclusive rights to the uploaded/created content. First point is that even if I am fully banned from a Social Network or Chat Service I can still phone call or email or video call (or visit if affordable) to the friends I like the most. Given the threshold of difficulty goes but non withstanding I can still do it. Thus it is I who controls the relationships, and they just are a tool which I use to help manage by virtual life. Second point, goes into the fact that I am the author of my â€œpublishedâ€ content and I have the rights to â€œun publishâ€ it from the specific network of choice or from the internet. (Given some will still be stored somewhere on some server somehow â˜º ) I donâ€™t have the rights to the network itself, but I do have the rights to my content. I also the right to let 3rd party service access my info for my liking, as long as, I donâ€™t degrade the service for others.

Re: Want IM Conglomeration? I Sure Don’t.

xman — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 14:41:25 -0000

Consider the phone system. If that were not interoperable it would not be good. IM is a similar case

Re: Want IM Conglomeration? I Sure Don’t.

PaulGlazowski — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 13:42:18 -0000

Brett,

Sure, the client itself is part of the draw, but the client requires a network to function. It needs a protocol of some sort. And if all clients are subject the same protocol, those clients still need to adhere to that protocol. So they can only function to the point that that core communications technology allows. Hence the guaranteed uniformity. If the networks are interconnected, then the clients' features could be genericized as well.

Re: Want IM Conglomeration? I Sure Don’t.

Brett — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 13:27:44 -0000

Interoperability with other popular networks is the first step in acquiring new users who were previously locked in by the fact that all their contacts were on another network. Once all networks interoperate with each other, you compete based on the merits of your chat client, not the user base of your network.

Re: Want IM Conglomeration? I Sure Don’t.

d. weis — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 13:04:10 -0000

in your article you call qtrax an experiment? it will launch this wednesday june 18 (see wwww.qtrax.com) with support of major record labels and offering access to p2p networks i think calling this new revolutionary service an experiment dosent do it justice its offering what media defender is trying to do legal p2p the difference is qtrax is free

Re: Want IM Conglomeration? I Sure Don’t.

zamazing — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 12:55:48 -0000

suuppeeerrrrrr