Keeping track of who is connected to what service is a pain. How many different instant messaging services can you name? Here at work we have two. There’s more.

The popular IM services have been around awhile. Yahoo. AOL’s AIM. MSN. Jabber. GoogleTalk. There’s a bunch more, some commercial, some open source, some just because. Each has a somewhat proprietary protocol, so special applications are needed to “chat” from one to the other.

The whole idea of IM is simple. Connect to someone else on a computer somewhere else in the world. Type a greeting, wait for a response, type a response to the response. Repeat ad nauseum. How is that efficient? It’s a conversation in email.

Email in and of itself can be a dangerous communication medium, hence the birth of emoticons to help soften the language used, or add some emotion to a phrase. Look at the emoticons for instant messaging utilities? I can remember five or six, but there are dozens of different icons for different uses. That’s ridiculous.

Most Mac instant messaging utilities lag behind their Windows counterparts in features and capabilities, though I’d be hard pressed to find a Windows user who gets as much out of all those features as a Mac user does with fewer features.

It’s time for instant messaging to grow up and the Mac is the place to start. Actually, I had high hopes for IM when Apple introduced the iSight camera and iChat. Finally, video conferencing for the masses. Mac masses. AIM users could never figure out how to get their audio and video to work. AIM is a mess.

What happened after iSight and iChat? Nothing. Apple includes iSight in all new iMacs and Mac notebooks, but about all it is good for is creating stupid photos in PhotoBooth and emailing the video or photographic obscenity to friends.

My favorite instant messaging utility is Adium because it connects to about a dozen different protocols. Most of the time. iChat could not be easier to use, so it’s typical Apple. iChat really needs to talk to more IM protocols than AIM.

Another question is ”why do we use instant messaging at all?” What’s wrong with video conferencing? Society has become lazy and email is easier to use. There’s no face to face, no voice to voice communication-- just endless clattering of worthless words on a keyboard.

I see people at work using different IM systems all the time. It’s possible that they’re messaging other co-workers on important matters, but there’s little evidence of that. When the boss walks by, most IM users quickly move a spreadsheet or word processing document or bring up a browser page. So much for the computer helping workers to be more productive.

It’s time for IM to grow up. We should dispense with the gazillion protocols, settle on one for general usage, one for secure usage, and make sure everyone has a utility that works for chat, voice, video, and records and saves all conversations (for business or home use). Until that happens we’re just playing around like children using a toy for something different than intended.

Check out the daily list of our 9 Word mini-Reviews at NoodleMac, and Kate's daily in-depth Mac software reviews at PixoBebo.

• Article by Jeffrey Mincey • Published on Thursday, September 6, 2007
• Category: Opinion • 12 Reader comment(s) • Email This • Digg This • Shop Now

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Readers Talk Back:

Paul Howland says:

Skype is rapidly rendering all other IM applications redundant, on my computer. The cross-platform high-quality video, audio, IM and gateway to traditional phones means that there’s little need for anything else. I still run Adium to communicate to remaining contacts without Skype, but I use it less and less. iChat looks like a nice application (in the adverts) but I’ve yet to find a single person I know that uses it! Totally useless.

— Posted on Sun Sep 09 at 1:50 pm by Paul Howland

Steve says:

I have been using SightSpeed for well over a month now. A wonderful video conferencing software, totally problem free. It has allowed for a sweet connection with my sister a few times a week, she has a Windows computer.....I am on an iBook. Hard to believe it could be this good, I have been trying many other ways, this one really works.

Give it a shot, free as well.

In general I use Skype for written text communication.

— Posted on Fri Sep 07 at 12:01 pm by Steve

topchat says:

In my view Jabber is the ‘glue’ that helps stick all the IM stuff together. Not so hard to figure out how to use iChat to connect to MSN for IM. Dare say the same applies to Yahoo! although I’ve never needed it.
On a slightly different tack I’m surprised that Google Chat hasn’t really taken off given the user base of GMail.

— Posted on Fri Sep 07 at 3:56 am by topchat

Gatesbasher says:

Wow! Daily Clue: I’ve got two words for you. Oat Bran! Look into it.

Personally, I use http://www.meebo.com/ It lets you have 6 different Instant Messengers all running at once: Yahoo, AIM, MSN, Google Talk, plus ICQ and Jabber (whatever the Hell they are.) It’s free, and if you sign up for an (also free) Meebo account, it’ll sign you in to all of them at once. AND I don’t need any other app running on my machine.

— Posted on Thu Sep 06 at 9:43 pm by Gatesbasher

Daily's Mom says:

There you go, Daily, causing problems online again. It’s bad enough that you’ve been banned from MySpace because you’re so frackin’ ugly.

NOBODY uses Jabber or GoogleTalk or any of the other protocols you mention.

Apple chose a losing horse. Again.

— Posted on Thu Sep 06 at 9:16 pm by Daily's Mom

Daily Clue says:

Hey! It would be nice if you actually did ANY research before you post something! You call this an article? Where the hell have you been?

iChat supports Jabber NATIVELY! That means you can connect to it and ANY other service that uses jabber as SIMPLY as you can connect to AIM.

You got that right: Jabber, googleTalk, LiveJournal, Gizmo.... yep, they are all NATIVE inside iChat.

iChat is ahead of the curve on this one you dimwit! It uses the OPEN STANDARD.

Get a clue, do some simple research, heck just search for iChat and IM networks in the search engine of your choice and you will find HUNDREDS of pages explaining how to use the jabber protocol to connect to every protocol out there.

Oh? you were too lazy to do any research? Don’t quit your day job then. Real journalists do research before posting, and real editors don’t let shlock like this get by.
------------------
Editor’s Note: the facts of the article, as well as the premise, stand up well despite Daily Clue’s attempt at ridicule (sure DC, lots of people using their Macs will dig into the Jabber protocol just so they can connect to everyone else-- NOT!). While iChat does AIM, it also does Jabber and a few others that seldom see the light of day among IM users. The premise is that IM standards are a mess and iChat, as is in OS X, does nothing to help clear up the mess, but adds to it.

— Posted on Thu Sep 06 at 9:12 pm by Daily Clue

Gatesbasher says:

I stand corrected. It’s just that in the last couple of years I must have had 50 people I contacted through e-mail or some other way ask: “Do you have Yahoo?” I’ve had maybe 2 ask if I had AIM. I’ve never had anybody ask if I had MSN. Just the luck of the draw I guess.

— Posted on Thu Sep 06 at 8:27 pm by Gatesbasher

DanMan says:

It’s 2 years old, but this article features numbers that are consistent with everything I’ve seen before. http://news.com.com/Yahoo,+Microsoft+join+IM+hands/2100-1025_3-5893802.html

— Posted on Thu Sep 06 at 8:06 pm by DanMan

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