It’s really not about Instant Messaging …
I just wanted to rant a little here about the big talk about Instant Messaging … it’s not about Instant Messaging! IMHO, it’s about communications, and people wanting to communicate effectivly and efficiently. Remember folks … this is all about meme transfers and replication! All of this relates to our personal identity, and the fact that our identity is created by the conversations that we are a part of. If we evaluate the roots of personal identity, identity becomes the attributes of ourselves that we accumulate to describe ourselves, to ourselves and others. So there are several steps in personal identity which layer on top of each other.

The first of these is the accumulation of our personal identity. This accumulation then includes the people that we have in our lives … our families, friends, co-workers, and other ‘buddies’. This list of ‘contacts’ or ‘buddies’ then becomes our ‘address book’ … the list of people that we converse with. What’s powerful about AIM and ICQ is that we have this list, and also have their ‘presence’ information … or their availability. This presence and availability is what really drives Instant Messaging. I could be launching e-mail, video conferencing, or any form of communication once I have located the ‘presence’ of the other person … Instant Messaging is just one of these forms of communciations. Heck, Instant Messaging isn’t much different from what SMTP mail protocols used to be!

I am a huge fan of Jabber … it is a leading contenter in my mind, and provides a very flexible architecture for presence and communciations … including Instant Messaging. This is a good article and Jabber continues to gain ground …

Jabber As The Coming IM Standard? [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters]