Jeff Dillon

The State of IM is pathetic
The state of instant messaging today is absolutely pathetic. I need three commercial IM clients just to talk to everyone that I know due to the gross incompatabilities for something as easy as sending a text string. Of course, there are a few solutions out there to work around this stuff, but they are not addressing the real problem and are always in catch-up mode.

Imagine if email were invented by a corporation instead of the academic community. We could easily have AOL email clients not able to communicate with MSN email clients which would be terrible. The real problem is that the big commercial IM applications do not want to be compatible with each other since it is perceived to diminish their communities.

The only reason for hope in this mess is the very open Jabber Software Foundation. Although they are doing some great work, many people are entreched in whatever IM client they use today so I am not sure that the situation will easily improve.

Perhaps instant messaging entering the business market will force change.