Infuriating Messenger 2.0

Today Robin Good has a detailed and thoughtful post on the future of Instant Messaging which jazzed me to write a post I've been carrying around in my head for a few days.

This week Robert Anderson came to town and shared some Expert Texture with me over dinner in Bellevue.  During our four hour dinner, we talked a lot about many things but among them was instant messaging.  By way of background, Robert and I are maternal cousins.  Our family has never been really close - being spread across the country and largely constantly distracted by something or other.

However, since we inadvertently became re-acquainted at my now-late Grandmother's 80th birthday party several years back, we have kept in touch - and largely over IM.  We are now, likely, the most conversant part of the whole Jacobberger diaspora.  This is entirely because of instant messaging - we can have a brief exchange each day that can be silly, serious or merely a ping but that's enough to keep in touch.

At Gray Hill Solutions, (we're hiring) we use IM constantly.  So constantly that we've created a lot of conventions around its use.  IM is a cure-all and a kill-all.  In the hands of humans, it is a dangerous weapon.

Robin Good's article shows the possibilities.  While I love IM and could never part with it, I'll point out some of the pitfalls he is overlooking.

Too many stovepiped clients

Robin says:

Web conferencing, video conferencing, co-browsing, application / desktop / screen sharing, live annotation and markup, live PowerPoint / presentation facilities, search, RSS, email, along with new forms of real-time group messaging (swarming) are all converging toward your favourite IM very, very soon. (Jim's emphasis)

Yes, your favorite IM client.  This is the major problem with IM.  While it is true that new IM clients do an amazing range of things - in a business context you cannot afford to be beholden to one IM client.  Even if it is your "favorite".

Every native IM client has some good features and it is missing some innovations I count on daily.   IM clients are loathe to fully open their APIs and allow real innovation. 

Robin further notes that IM isolation is an issue with this comment:

This is the bread of any 2.0 technology. Being open for re-use, hook-in and extension by other third-party providers/ developers by providing open APIs. Instant messaging makes no exception.

At Gray Hill we use Trillian.  Trillian is the greatest program ever created, or at least somewhat close to it.  This allows us access to all the stovepiped IM services, as well as the open ones.  The only major player even getting close to trying to support interoperability is Google, which uses Jabber as their client base. 

"Improvements" to the stovepiped IM clients can cause problems in Trillian - they are very quick to fix these, but it would be a lot better if totally open APIs enabled Cerulean Studios to be free of that annoyance.

He quotes a guy from MSFT as saying:

Martin Taylor, former corporate VP of Windows Live and MSN, stated:

"We regard Windows Live Messenger as one of the most pivotal services within Windows Live. Windows Live Messenger is also integrated with many of the Windows Live services to serve as a convenient entry point into consumers' online world so they can do even more than IM right from one place. People will be able to launch into blogging, sharing data, search, watching videos, and a multitude of other services via
Messenger, he indicated."

    via messenger.  Great.  Widows already forces me to load messenger, even though I don't use it.  How long before using Yahoo Groups causes me to load the Yahoo messaging client?  MSN Messenger is an ad-fest that uses too many resources, too much screen real estate and has highly limited buddy list management.  I'd rather not be stuck with their dictated and single-source client.

Need a setting between allow and ignore

I have long wanted to be able to set various alert levels for different groups of contacts.  When you are busy, you don't want unwanted messages.  And, just to be a pain about it, I want to be able to dynamically tag people so they can be in various groups.  Not just "Work" and "Friends".  I want "Brazilian Launch" and "Spider Roll Enthusiasts" to be quickly defined ad hoc groups that I can allow for messages while I ignore the rest of the world.

Robin says:

At best, you are finally going to be able to appear "busy" for your sister while you are offline for your "outside-of-work-friends" and you are fully "online and available" for your working team only. Isn't about time? Multiple, non-conflicting presence statuses should be a must if we want to seriously manage in real-time our contacts in a virtual world.

Indeed, why in a world of rampant tagging is IM so far behind?  I would imagine that it's because it's controlled by MSN and AOL - both of whom are trying to find ways to integrate it internally with their apps and their network.  If Google is listening, this is the true growth of IM.

Need to mine the conversation

No system, although Trillian takes a shot at this, really allows you to tag elements of your conversations for later retrieval.  Trillian will allow you to set a bookmark.  But it's not quite there.  You can't share the bookmark with a group or your chat partner.  You can't create a shared library of minable conversations.

Rule:  Instant messaging does not mean immediate messaging

The world needs to know that Instant Messaging means your information is delivered instantly.  It does not mean that your act of typing has suddenly elevated you to the most important person in the world for the recipient.  I get around this by having status messages like "I'm buried in a document, may be slow to respond."  I noted with some satisfaction that my friend Jay does the same thing.

What instant messaging does require (and I'm personally bad at this), is that you do announce your status so other people know how to react to you.  If they think you are there and available and you don't respond, they will think you are ignoring them. 

Rule: Remember: Instant messaging is rude, inconsiderate and boorish

IM is rude.  It just shows up.  You didn't ask for it.  It can be like friend-spam.  People you seriously love with all your heart can piss you off in about 2 seconds in IM.  Remember that IM is cold text (even if you use those ugly colourful AOL rainbow font things).  So when you e-mail, don't just type.  You must compose.  You must re-engage your art of conversation in a way e-mail made you forget. 

Which segs to....

Rule: Don't IM mad

Readers will recognize that my other rule is don't blog mad.  I also try not to talk on the phone mad or converse with my wife mad.  In fact, if you're mad you should probably just shut yourself in a room with no means of communication whatsoever - save for your blow-up punching clown.

Given the previous rule, IM'ing mad is like a nuclear bomb.  It will destroy relationships and lead to unproductive screaming matches.  At Gray Hill, our secondary rule is, "If you are mad, shut down trillian and pick up the phone."  I know that I just said "Don't talk on the phone mad" but we've found that 90% of all IM blowups begin with a misunderstanding in initial intent.  Those are quickly diffused.

My business partner and I didn't extend this same courtesy to our accountant during a set of conversations over the last few weeks.  Let's just say that has had a permanent impact on our  relationship with her.

Closing

Robin is right, immediate conversations and the collaborations they engender are the future.  But we've got a ways to go before people fully understand how to integrate it into their professional and social lives.  In addition, we have several stovepiped IM clients that offer some nice services and some lousy ones.  We have Trillian and other programs to integrate them - but clients keep increasing their functionality without providing appropriate APIs to allow for external innovators to improve on the IM paradigm. I am looking forward to watching how things evolve.


Technorati Tags: instant messaging, AOL, AIM, MSN Messenger, Windows Live, IM 2.0, instand messaging 2.0