When Will Mac Instant Messaging Grow Up?

It seems that everyone is using some form of instant messaging, text messaging, or chat these days. What a horrible waste of time.

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.