six oldest new ideas in chat

The six oldest new ideas in chat...

Since I came across this post, I was looking for the proper

illustration before coming back to it. In the end, the simplest and

first impression is always the right one: this author does not have

the slightest clue of what he is talking about...

First of all, he starts by being confused by the subtle difference

between "chat" and "instant messaging". In effect, most of the

"exemplifying" services or product he mentions are doing with instant

messaging, and some of them offers multi user chat facilities. But

instant messaging is not really news.

Interoperability. Ever since the invention of the telephone,

interoperability has been the single requirement for any mediated

communication system. In short we cannot decently consider this to be

a new idea. Because of the early calcification forming into the

innovative region of most corporate executives' brain, we

unfortunately face a walled garden landscape for instant messaging

(amongst other things). So suddenly discovering that "clearly, open

standards are here to stay" is not properly visionary. Well as they

say in China, "when the wise man point to the moon, the fool only sees

the finger".

As a passing remark, unless I am mistaking, Trillian, Gaim, Adium and

Miranda are multi protocol instant messaging client applications, not

"services".

In-Browser Chat. This one is misleading because of the confusion

between chat and instant messaging. But a simple search on the term

chat will bring back 551,000,000 results which tends to indicate that

chat has been in the news for quite some time. And when you carefully

look at the results, you will find that many point to in-browser chat

for so called "adults" services. But isn't this the oldest business in

the world?

There are a number of browser based instant messaging clients which

are trying to solve the interoperability issues mentioned above. For

the same reasons that lead to the ineluctable disappearance of

communication silos, only those services that rely on open protocols

will remain. At that point in time, the end user will have the choice

of installing a standard based client application on its workstation

or use the same application hosted at a provider. The debate between

hosted and non-hosted application has been part of the IT landscape

ever since its beginning. This is not new either.

Location Based Chat. Geo location services have existed in mobile

phone services since the early days of GSM. Before the web 1.0 bubble,

some vendors were even touting geo location as "killer application".

And it is still part of several mobile application services trying to

bring contextual search to road warriors.

As I explained earlier, geo location can participate in bringing a

sensation of "place" into mediated communication. But initial research

on the subject dates back to the mid nineties. It is fair to say that

most of the research was concerned about "virtual reality" worlds at

the time. Obviously, instant messaging was not yet considered

mainstream. This simply re-enforce the length of the road leading from

ideas to their applications in different domains, but this has always

been the case.

Flexible Identities. A quick look at this post will convince you that

multiple personae have one of the longest research histories in the

context of the Internet. You will also notice that there is a subtle

distinction between "multiple personae" and "multiple facets" of one's

identity. The same as between Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hide...

As a remark, the provided examples only implement precepts from the

now defunct Presence and Availability Management forum on how granular

presence was to be used to manage communication address handles, and

when thinking of it, all the call forwarding features available in a

PBX were already a way to "separate your private and professional

faces". After ten years of "converged communication" talks, applying

the same principles to instant messaging should not come as a real

surprise.

Contextual Chat. In this case we are really talking about chat. This

section presents a blurred mix of two different concepts. On one end

there is the chat room client who can be embedded on different web

pages, such as blog posts, and provide a fixed context for discussion.

On the other end we have the "virtual presence" clients as browser's

add-in which will work on any web page. The idea of being instantly

aware of other users reading the same web page emerged early in the

history of the Web. Implementation projects appeared in the fist half

of the nineties with the advent of Virtual Places and other

co-browsing initiatives. Ten to fifteen years on the Internet time

scale are more like a century to me.

Rich Media Chat. As the author puts it "web cams and microphones have

been on the web for a while", and it is only the commoditization of

broadband network access and computing power that made "rich media",

read internet audio and video, accessible to the mass. Already in the

early days of video-conferencing, when only ISDN and leased lines were

available, several systems were offering in-band instant messaging and

even document sharing. Once again the idea dates back fifteen years.

As for the previous section, speaking of novelty is not appropriate.

That said, the trend to combine audio to instant messaging is natural

as it mimic a real world behavior. The challenge will be to provide a

seamless experience moving from one medium to the other across

different devices.

The Internet has an immense magnifying power. It even allows us to

quickly search a vast knowledge repository for information that would

be relevant to make a post valuable. But using a flashy title is still

far easier than providing relevant content: you only need to utter six

words instead of a few hundred. Unfortunately the lazy approach based

on making noise has been around since the beginning of time.

Technorati Tags: XMPP, Jabber, Interoperability, Instant messaging,

Antecipate

Labels: Instant messaging, XMPP

posted by Jean-Louis Seguineau at 1:51 PM

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