Paolo writes: I use instant messaging a lot. I have accounts on Yahoo!, ICQ, AOL/iChat, MSN and Jabber. I use two clients: iChat AV (because it allows me to do high quality video conferencing with other Mac users) and Proteus, a muli-protocol IM client.

I don't have all these accounts because it's cool, I do because there's people I work with that use these different protocols and thanks to my multi-protocol client this was not a problem. Until now. (deletia)
In other words, they are trying to drive the market by controlling protocols.

Meanwhile they are breaking the system and making our life miserable, but they don't care. The IM war has started and we are all prisoners. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]

Y'know, when I commented to this, I jokingly said something along the lines of "looks like it's time to go back to IRC, eh?"
I think I'm more serious about that now. Clearly, Chat/IM applications cannot be trusted to a single vendor. They are all going to play it for all that they can, and exclude anyone they think they can get away with excluding.

Of course there are problems. My nick is generally "wraithe", been using it for 15 years now (yeeesh), and back when I used IRC, there was a pretty good chance someone else would be using it.

One of the advantages of the current IM systems is that the names are centrally registered. Thusly, my nick is my nick, not someone else who decided to use it that day.

So, biggest requirement; central registry/directory of some kind. or, failing that, some sort of naming scheme that would let you be uniquely identified. The first thing that jumps to my mind would be a nick+email address scheme.

Of course, this and the central registry thing have problems. Spammers.

More on this later, I think I'm going to go look and see if anyone else it working on it.

For something to think about though, check out this IRC client.

7:47:11 PM     Discuss: []