IM… Therefore I Am
Since yesterday’s post I’ve been haunted by the question of what will drive instant messaging vendors to adopt a unified standard. I started off convinced that there must be some new feature so compelling that it would enable one client to gain a preponderant share of the market and impose its protocol on the others. But the simple reality is that IM is very straightforward: I send a message, you receive it. Without completely changing the paradigm, no feature, no matter now appealing, is likely to cause a wholesale reorganization of the market.
When I mentioned this to Cedric he looked me straight in the eye and said, “Identity.” And he’s right. If we believe that a distributed system for managing online identity will eventually prevail, this would provide a powerful motivating force for converging on a single instant messaging protocol.
Currently the profile required by IM clients is extremely limited, consisting mainly of basic personal information like name, address, maybe a thumbnail photo. This means that the pain incurred when registering for another client is minimal. This doubtless explains why people are more inclined to use several clients simultaneously than to install a metaclient that supports multiple networks.
Now imagine that your profile is linked to a whole slew of valuable information that you have built up painstakingly over a period of time: blog, photos, reputation (for trust management), consumer profile (for recommendations), community memberships, media library, etc. To the extent that this information can be leveraged by an IM application (and I believe it can), this will make it much less attractive to move between different clients.
Of course, the big online players are already attempting to lock users in by linking their services to a rich profile, as I explained in my very first blog entry. I argued that this is unlikely to succeed unless the profile is owned and managed by the user, who choses explicitly to share it with other users and services.
This gives us a much clearer picture of the future of IM. The market is not going to consolidate until you can leverage your IM account to do a lot more than just chatting. A good example of where things are heading is Google’s acquisition of Picasa. Google’s explanation for this move, namely to facilitate uploading of photos to their Blogger service, strikes me as pure hokum. Much more convincing is the theory that Google is planning to make inroads into the IM market, leveraging Picasa’s Hello.
I’m not one of those who believe that Google is going to magically become the king of IM just because they happen to have the hot brand name du jour. But the principle is valid. At the end of the day, instant messaging is a feature, not a product, and when it starts to be encompassed into a much richer environment that is open, extensible and exploits available synergies, then we’ll find a way out of the current IM morass.
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