Sunday, August 22, 1999
Instant message revolution is ahead
BY MIKE SNIDER
USA Today
The messages from America Online to Microsoft have been curt and consistent: Stay out of our instant-messaging system.
Microsoft's nearly instantaneous responses: Open your system to everyone.
The exchanges have been making headlines across the country.
Now here's a message from the Internet engineers and other developers who are designing the future of instant messaging: If disputes can be set aside and systems designed to work together, what today is a basic text-chat system could become a revolutionary form of communication tomorrow.
With today's instant messaging, people are alerted when friends and co-workers log on, and they can initiate real-time typed conversations if both parties agree.
In the future, people will be able to send “smart” instant messages that find the recipients immediately, whether they're at work, carrying a wireless phone or hand-held PC, or at home watching TV. Such messages may be real-time video, voice or text.
Relevant information arrives instantly. A broker and customer could chat when it's time to sell. Retailers and fans could chat when a music release from a favorite artist hits the store. A concerned parent driving home from work might get instant medical information from a blood pressure monitor or an electronic thermometer.
The futuristic applications of instant messages are “basically only limited by your imagination,” said John Harrison, co-founder of Ecutel, an Alexandria, Va., firm that specializes in secure mobile communications networks.
While AOL and MSN joust for control of today's instant messaging systems, engineers and developers are designing the messaging features of the future. The result is expected to be a network that is constantly aware of users' status and their presence on line.
Next-generation “Buddy Lists” could reach TV set-top boxes, hand-held PCs, cell phones and home phones. A seamless network would take messages — a cell phone call, a Webcam chat, a typed message, a picture or a fax — and format it for the devices being used that time.
Instant messaging today involves “my buddy on the other side” of the connection, said Dave Marvit, co-chairman of the Internet Engineering Task Force group on the Instant Messaging & Presence Protocol.
His take on the future: “Say Mother has a heart-rate monitor. I could check on” her by “an instant message-type technology.”
Some information products suggest this instant messaging future. Users of Yahoo! Messenger (messenger.yahoo.com) are notified when mail arrives, when stocks hit certain prices and whether their bid was tops in a Yahoo! auction. Friends and contacts with the software can tell when the others are on line; text or voice chats can involve 10 people.
PeopleLink of Santa Monica, Calif., has created enhanced instant messaging software that lets strangers with similar interests communicate individually or in groups, instantly or through e-mail. An icon (a porch light that's on) on message boards and in chat rooms signifies that a person is available for instant messaging; an envelope icon means they are not on line but can receive e-mail.
Instant messages “give you the presence of somebody. You know if somebody is on line, and that's pretty important,” said Steve Glenn, founder of PeopleLink, which has an on-line community (www.peoplelink.com) and has created systems for such partners as iVillage.
“We've taken the concept that it's not just your friends or colleagues you want to know are on line. This allows people who have shared interests — that they are fly-fishermen or single mothers, or they have Crohn's disease — to pretty effectively connect and communicate.”
In general, he said, “you get a "stickier' experience,” meaning people stay at a Web site longer.
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