Today, Five Across announced the release of InterComm (see CEO blog: Giving Birth), a new instant messaging and collaboration solution, and I really like the thinking behind InterComm, but the product just doesn't go far enough to displace other solutions I use or favor.

Where It Is Headed

But Intercomm is headed in the right direction in many ways.

Here you see the client in the background, with a window opened to propose a meeting time (click to see fullsize image). I like the notion of instrumenting an instant messaging client with coordinatation features -- shared calendaring, for example. But I want it to be a real shared calendar experience, not just 'proposed meetings' -- all my calendar stuff should be in there to be shared. (And I have a peeve about the clunkiness of the interface here: you have to click on the cell to represent a time to meet - there is no way to simply type in "12:15pm" or a date. And apparently, there is no way to have a meeting at 7am, at all.)

In the client, you can see that there are groups, and associated with any group (such as "Us'n") are shared notes, files, and dates. The file sharing is along the lines of that found in other solutions, like Groove, Shinkuro, Clever Cactus. Ditto shared notes, which are broadcast and then accessible through the tab.

What I would really like to see is more of a push toward "microblogging" within the context of the IM client, like the visionaries at 2entwine are doing, or what WiredReach is pushing at. Instead of a static transition from instant messaging style real-time communication to posting files and notes for slow-time communication, I would like to see more support for tempo shifting. For example, Intercomm supports archiving of chat, but chat archives can't be used as context for a shared file, or turned into a note (unless you cut and paste manually).

Maybe Someday, But Not Today

Other interesting elements (like a polling capability) hint at future directions, but without a rich, full coordinative and collaborative feature set -- shared calendaring, tasks and project timelines, and the like, the things that other shared folder style products do fairly badly and that IM solutions don't generally attempt to do at all -- its hard to see why anyone would adopt this solution today. And that's before you consider voice and video capabilities -- totally absent here -- that people are now taking more or less for granted.

The folks at Five Across have a long way to go, although they seem to have made a good start, and they are certainly pointed in the right direction. It's not enough, yet, to get me to start inviting my colleagues to start working with the tool, but I will definitely keep looking at their progress over the next few months.