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Stowe Boyd is a well-known media subversive, and an internationally recognized authority on real-time, collaborative and social technologies. His new blog is Message.

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December 08, 2005

The Buddylist Is The Center of The Universe 2.0: A Call For Interoperability

Posted by Stowe Boyd

The recent announcement by Yahoo regarding their entry into the increasingly busy VoIP marketspace -- and the rapid commoditization of that market because of the battle that is shaping up between Yahoo, eBay, Microsoft, AOL, and soon, I expect, Google -- is just one puzzle piece clicking together in what promises to be the realignment of the central communication metaphor of the online universe, or what I hereby dub as Universe 2.0.

The instant messaging model of communication, based on synchronous messaging and continuous presence status, is displacing the store-and-forward, asynchronous email model, at long, long last.

I have argued for the past decade that instant messaging in simply better than email, for a long list of reasons. Add to the growing list of reasons the fusion of voice, and soon, video messaging on your cellphone, with the online messaging architecture.

One outgrowth of this transition toward instant communication will be the realization that email should be used as a last recourse, only when real time communication is not possible or unavailable. For example, I want to ask you a question about a project: in this presence enabled Universe 2.0 (leaving aside the niddling, tiny, little detail of interoperability between the services for later) I determine that you are online and available to talk to me. Obviously, I want my answer as soon as possible, and being a textual sort of guy, I type the question, and a few seconds later, I have my answer.

Alternatively, if you are not available, on many instant messaging solutions I can simply send an offline message, using exactly the same user interface: the instant messaging client. On your return to the office, or upon turning on your cell phone asfter exiting a meeting, you'd recieve the message, and perhaps return to a synchronous form of communication with me to reply, or perhaps determine that I am unavailable, and leave me an offline message, too.

But today's mishmash model, switching back and forth from IM client to email client, with two unintegrated repositories of messages -- on one hand, emails, and on the other, IM logs -- that has got to end.

My prediction: instant messaging will become the domininant metaphor for Universe 2.0 -- which subsumes Web 2.0, by the way, but reaches out past the Web to include every connected communication device, like cell phones, entertainment systems, games consoles, and the connected refrigerators and cars of tomorrow -- and email will become a footprint on the path of this communications evolution.

Brad Stone, who broke the Yahoo announcement in Newsweek, collected some new data about instant messaging adoption:

[from IM's New Calling - - MSNBC.com]
But instant messaging, in case you're not already addicted to it, is the preferred communications medium on the Internet, more popular for many users than e-mail. Teens spend hours pinging their friends after school, business folk use it to avoid unpleasant or inconvenient conversations with colleagues and bosses employ it to summon underlings to their offices for face-to-face meetings. Three hundred million people around the world, including 80 million Americans, send 12 billion instant messages (IMs) a day, according to research firms comScore, Media Metrix and IDC. The IM networks allow you to see if your friends or colleagues are online, active and available for conversation. And short text-only IMs usually draw immediate responses, rather than sitting unread in someone's cluttered e-mail inbox.

By adding the ability to make voice calls from the IM networks to outside lines, and vice versa, the Internet companies are turning their IM networks into the kind of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service that Danish startup Skype popularized over the last two years. Starting this week, Yahoo users will be able to buy credits of $10 or $25, then use Yahoo Messenger on their PC to call anywhere in the United States or, at a slightly higher rate, to more than 30 countries. For $3 a month or $30 a year, Yahoo will also give users a personal phone number for their PCs, which will let them receive calls from regular phones on their computer. They can pick their area code, so U.S. users with relatives in London, for example, could choose a London phone number and allow their relatives to enjoy local rates when they call.

Yahoo's announcement was not entirely unexpected. Yahoo bought Internet telephony company Dialpad Communications in June, foretelling its entry in the VoIP arena. Microsoft bought a similar VoIP firm, Teleo Inc., two months later, and will surely soon add phone service to Microsoft Messenger, used by about 22 million people in the U.S. EBay bought VoIP leader Skype for a whopping $2.5 billion in September and plans to integrate Skype phone calls and instant messaging, which could allow buyers and sellers to more easily get in touch after an auction closes. And last month, domestic instant messaging leader AOL, with 53 million users, began offering a VoIP service called TotalTalk that allows users to make Internet telephone calls using a broadband telephone adapter that they can connect to their home phone.

In this way, telephones are becoming one form of end point of the instant messaging-based communications network that is linking us all together. Old, dumb phones don't broadcast presence information, but all cell phones do -- is the phone on or not, where in the network is the individual, and so on -- and depending on how the cell services wish to make that information available to the instant messaging networks, we are likely to see a restructuring of the world's communication DNA around this revolutionary concept.

And, it's about time that the world's governments -- and especially the US government -- wake up to the need for imposed interoperability of the instant messaging networks. It is clearly in the public interest for us to be able to access the presence status of anyone, on any service (so long as each individual can opt in, and manage access in suitable ways). As these networks are likely to become the dominant force in telephony, and will rapidly eclipse the old telephone systems, it is time for the Internet giants to move past their outmoded rationale for a fragmented collection of incompatible networks. The parochical interests of Yahoo, Microsoft, eBay, Google, and AOL should not be holding back the emergence of Universe 2.0, but in the absence of governmental interference there seems to be no appeal to reason that could stimulate those competitors to put aside their conflicting interests and structure the standards and infrastructure necessary to insure a unified communication space.

Think how strange it will be if I have to call you on your phone , via my Yahoo Messenger account or Skype, because the phone system is the only piece of the growing real-time network where government regulations have imposed interconnectivity and interoperability of networks.

It's time for a public outcry against the oligarchy whose intransigence in this regard represents a monumental hindrance to what could otherwise be an enormous benefit for us all.

The buddylist is clearly the center of Universe 2.0, and I would like to have one buddylist, not four or five, and if that requires the Majors to make nice, and to work out the complexities in a fair way, then so be it. There was a time in America when Ma Bell owned the network, including the phone on your kitchen wall, and you couldn't replace it with a cheaper version. And there was a time when the phone companies owned your phone number, and if you dropped the service, you lost it. And in the not too distant future, we will be telling teenagers about a time when the Giants owned our buddylists, and we couldn't communicate across the services because Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, eBay, and AOL thought it was better to have a fragmented world. And they will laugh at how stupid the old fogies were, back in the day. And they will be right, because it is stupid, and if we continue to put up with it, we are stupid.

[tags: universe 2.0, instant messaging, voip, yahoo, microsoft, aol, ebay, skype, google, Brad Stone]

Comments (162) + TrackBacks (1) | Category: Technology

COMMENTS

1. Nicolas on December 8, 2005 03:35 PM writes...

Agreed! This reminds me an old post I wrote: http://tecfa.unige.ch/perso/staf/nova/blog/2005/01/27/tech-im-as-the-interface/

I think there is also the bot issue in IM (for instance the Wall Street Journal, the Makezine or the RecipeBuddie) as another form of information management. This is another way to interact with information sources.

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December 08, 2005

The Buddylist Is The Center of The Universe 2.0: A Call For Interoperability

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