America Online is extending its Enterprise IM plans to include a couple of new partners, namely FaceTime Communications and Akonix.

The online giant said FaceTime Communications and Akonix will be able to incorporate AIM’s instant messaging and online presence technology into its products. The companies also will sell AIM’s application programming interface (API) to businesses that wish to develop their own IM and presence features.

[…]

Other uses could include information retrieval. For instance, if a salesman is out meeting with clients and needs competitive information, companies can create applications to retrieve data through internal IM networks to prepare for a sales pitch.

Source: News.com, “AOL opens messaging to enterprise developers”

I’m still waiting to hear how the Macromedia Central integration will work. It’s been almost a year now and there has been pretty much dead silence on the matter. A shame considering the potential of that marriage.

The researchers at the University of Michigan have come up with their own “Small World Instant Messaging” system. The system works as follows:

To search for information, a user sends a question to his own referral agent, which broadcasts the query to all of the user’s buddies’ agents. A referral agent in the buddy’s messenger searches its information identity profile to see if that person is likely to be able to answer the question; if not it can forward the query to its buddies.

When a likely match is found, that person sees the question and the path the query traveled, and can start chatting with the questioner immediately or make plans to discuss it later.

Source: Social Software Weblog, “Take a SWIM : Small-World Instant Messaging system”

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Yahoo’s recent closure of its IM gateway to 3rd party users, specifically Trillian (see “IM Networks Uphold Isolation: Death to Trillian”). In that post, I noted that Yahoo! named SPIM as its scapegoat but suggested doubts that the truth was out in the open.

One of my main assertions was that “Money Maintains Separation”. This received quite a few comments, on both sides of the fence. Some believed that I didn’t have enough evidence to really discount Yahoo’s explanation. Others were fully in support that the “capitalists” were in control of the keys.

I came across a mention on Renee’s Blog that pointed to some News.com coverage I missed. Charlie Cooper resonates some of the ideas I had cited, and adds some more fuel.

Nobody’s yet figured out how to make a business of instant messaging, but AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo must know where all this is headed. In the future, these companies are going to become more like phone companies and will want to bundle “value added” communications services with Internet access features. All it takes is a big broadband pipe and agreement on the protocols of communications.

[…]

Years ago, the technology world came up with an ungainly term that really says it all: “interoperability.” Instant messaging has become hugely popular in the last five years. Now it’s a question of breaking down old barriers. The Big Three each have their particular agendas, but helping to smooth things for the rest of us is surely in their enlightened self-interest.

Source: News.com, “What’s so exclusive about IM?”

I’m curious, though, at what rate we might expect change. Almost any web developer can tell you that IE is a terrible browser when it comes to standards support. Granted, the community of Standards Gear Heads is only a subset of the web developer community as a whole, however, it’s not small. Despite that seeming “pressure” Microsoft hasn’t been compelled to really move forward much at all in years with the IE codebase, except to plug the heavily leaking ship.

Monopolies seem to retard change that’s in the direction of the monster’s momentum. Do we really get what we want by pushing back? What formats and techniques do we use to fight? If we’re always downloading the latest version but complaining about Bug #1212122, can we really expect someone up there to think it matters?

For what must be years now, I have avidly used and recommended Trillian as my IM client of choice. For anyone that does not know, Trillian is a meta-chat client that provided many interesting and useful functions. For the most part, users were attracted since it allows a single client that connects to all of the major chat systems. Other key features included secure communications between Trillian users and automatic chat logging.

Unfortunately, the infighting that exists between the major IM clients has made remaining committed to Trillian tedious at times. Originally, there were many instances where AIM, MSN, and Yahoo! would intentionally alter their connection protocols to block Trillian (and sometimes other meta-chat tools).

Quite some time ago, MSN officially shut the door and forced most users to return to the Microsoft client to connect to their Messenger accounts. The latest blow came today as Yahoo! drops the hammer and shut out Trillian once again.

Beginning at about 6 p.m. Wednesday, Yahoo changed its instant messaging language to prevent third-party services, such as Trillian, from accessing its service. Like previous statements, the company said the block is meant as a pre-emptive measure against spammers from its Yahoo Messenger service.

“Spammers are being aided by entities that are abusing our systems, where they effortlessly gain knowledge of pathways and back-alley access to send spam,” Yahoo spokeswoman Mary Osako said.

Source: News.com, “Yahoo to Trillian: Talk to the hand”

Of course, there are some issues that really are important to note here:

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Yahoo! has finally crumbled and is shuttering its Enterprise IM operations. There is hardly cause for alarm, however. For the most part, the writing was on the walls from the beginning. News.com notes:

In an informal interview earlier this week, Yahoo’s Chief Information Officer Lars Rabbe said the enterprise instant messenger was shelved, because Yahoo is largely a consumer company and not structured to take on the kind of support tasks and other responsibilities that come with selling corporate software.

The move will consolidate Yahoo’s consumer and enterprise products into one product package.

Source: News.com, “Yahoo scraps enterprise IM”

Business IM is still alive and kicking. In many ways, it serves the industry better to have solutions designed from the bottom up for their industry than to try and retrofit a widely deployed system to a narrow focus. Ironically, all the convergence makes it hard to tell just yet what form of IM will dominate, the one that currently rules, or some new enterprise-class version.

Stowe’s latest Darwin piece talks about the 4Cs (Communication, Coordination, Collaboration, and Community) and the seemingly inevitable blurring/convergence that is happening as software tools evolve to their more advanced, and potentially useful, social tools status.

In a quick and dirty example of this transgression, AIM’s new plans shed some useful light:

“We’re making (AOL Instant Messenger) a new front door for communications services,” said Ed Fish, senior vice president of AOL’s desktop messaging unit. “We think it’s becoming the new phone.”

[…]

“The idea of being able to escalate an instant-messaging session to an audio conference is new,” said Andy Nilssen, an analyst at Wainhouse Research. “We’ve been waiting for it, and there’s good demand for it.”

Source: News.com, “AOL unveils premium instant-messaging services”

Blurrage indeed.

A few days ago, Yahoo! released an updated version of its Messenger product. Generally speaking, I do not use Yahoo! IM, or any specific IM client as I prefer to work with tools like Trillian so the announcement slid past me. Yesterday, an old friend and fellow developer IMed me to rave about the many changes to the new messenger and to bless their virtues. Naturally, I was intrigued so I installed it and set up an account to test it with.

After installing the app and using it for an hour or so, I’ve discovered many very interesting features worthy of mention. There are many new and features added to the mix, however it the most compelling cluster in the Digital Identity and Privacy domains.

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AOL has released a new version of it’s ICQ instant messenger. Although ICQ has been around for some time, it’s always had a strange suite of features that seemed to attract one group and irk the other.

I’ve used ICQ for years now and only keep it running (via Trillain, of course) to keep in touch with the very few contacts I’ve had on it since i started using it. This new release hopes to change this level of committment and involvement it seems.

Clearly aimed at the developer market, the new version attempts to introduce a programming interface that will allow the messaging window to serve as a IM Platform, as opposed to the plain-jane Client.

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News.com reports on an experimental IM client called NotesBuddy from IBM:

‘

NotesBuddy, which is already used extensively inside Big Blue, seeks to blur the borders between instant messaging and e-mail.

In NotesBuddy, IM dialogs are stored in e-mail in-boxes and people can search for them by subject or other classifications. The application also can automatically determine whether to send a note as a message or e-mail, depending on the present status of the recipient. Links to the company’s phone system also exist.

Indeed, NotesBuddy is a project that aims to eliminate one of the major problems of IM. Namely, that it often functions like a technological island.

With popular versions of IM, “you have no connection to your business documents,” said Alan Tannenbaum, a senior technical staff member at IBM whose research focuses on human-computer interaction.

Source: News.com, “IBM heeds message to integrate IM, e-mail”

The most interesting aspect of this particular application, in my opinion, is the application of presence data to real life. The NotesBuddy application is able to intelligently route messages to the most “appropriate” location. This reminds me in many ways of the Convoq ASAP product and its Lifeline and Stand-In features.

I’m also wondering when more of the news will cover technology in terms of our need for connectivity as opposed to the tools that enable it. IM is not popular because IM is the best tool ever — it just extends our need for immediacy.

actionScriptHero points out an interesting quote from Kevin Lynch (Macromedia employee) regarding the connection paradigms and Central’s benefit;

Applications today are largely divided across a chasm of local desktop
applications with little reliance on the network for data, and web applications
that are totally dependent on a live network connection. In reality, people are
not living in these connectivity extremes, and typically have occasional access
to the network, particularly with mobile computers and handheld devices. The
existing model for applications today doesn’t represent this usage pattern
well, where applications largely fall into “desktop” or “web” categories.
Applications should be able to more easily live across both of these worlds,
gaining the advantages of network connectivity when it’s available and
continuing to function on the local desktop when offline.

Source: Macromedia White Paper

I thought it important to acknowledge that I do see the value in an Occassionally Connected device as that scenario is increasingly becoming real for more and more consumers. On the other hand, though, I have to wonder how long that scenario really will make sense. The trend seems to be moving towards “Internet Everywhere” more than anything else. WiFi has been introduced for free in public spaces from San Francisco to New York City. Merchants are adding WiFi to their retail locations as an additional incentive to eat, drink, and shop there. Systems are being developed to deploy WiFi on airlines and to utilize power lines to provide network connectivity with an unprecedented ease. All of these situations seem to point to a “Casually Connected” society as opposed to an “Occassionally Connected” one, though the “Occassional” is more the paradigm we are currently living in.

Additionally, more and more of our services are collaboration-based and have a serious dependency on “instant” connectivity. There’s a reason that AIM is available for cell phones, palm pilots, etc. and it’s not because I want to view my list of contacts, it’s because I want to interact with them in real-time. The trend over the years has been to move interaction as close as possible to the person while making it as immediate as possible. We went from hand-written messages at the front desk, to voicemail systems, to pager, to cell phones, to SMS. All of these systems seemingly intend to improve on immediacy and quality of interaction, not to create opportunities to delay interaction.

Naturally, this is not the only avenue that the “Occassional Connected” user strolls down. Macromedia does a nice job demonstrating the various uses for this technology. The main question is how valuable are those times when I am between connections and what level of interest I have in continuing to work with a potentially dwarfed version of the original, connected version. I don’t know the answer, but I am curious to see how people will use Central apps in the future as compared to existing services like AvantGo, etc. Is a better interface alone enough? It could be.

Yesterday, I tried to lay out some initial definitions for the term “Casually Connected” building on examples from the real world. In that discussion, I think I hit on 2 definitions for the phrase:

Casual as Consciousness

As opposed to the “obvious” definition that casual means “sometimes”, this is a reflection of mindshare. When a system (be it Instant Messaging, Blogging, whatever) offers the intuitive solution or seems to be the ideal destination or resource for a particular need,

Casual as Convenient

In this sense, the terms reflects on the technology available to end-users. As a system provides technological solutions to an end-user’s NEEDS they will grow to see the device or service as an extension of their personal and professional workflows.

Note that these situations are mutually exclusive of each other. One need not know the technology behind utilizing an implementation, just as one need not know of any specific implementations to understand the concept of something.