By all accounts, the adoption of instant messaging has been impressive. From a standing start some three years ago, there are now getting on for an estimated 150 million users worldwide sending nearly 2 billion instant messages a day. Now the technology is increasingly being viewed as an essential ingredient for future IP services, particularly in the mobile market.

Why?

Are you there – anywhere?

Instant messaging is simply the ability to send and receive text messages in real time. In order to do this, both parties must be online at the same time. Further, in order to initiate a dialogue, the initiator must know beforehand that the other party is already online. This is presence detection, in other words the ability of the network to be able to inform every user whether other users they know are online or not at any particular time – wherever they are physically located.

This is the basis of the buddy lists used in AOL Instant Messenger and other applications, and this is the real power behind instant messaging’s popularity. Not too surprisingly, it grew up initially in the US mainly for social and entertainment purposes, although it is now beginning to be adopted for some business use as well. It’s also centred substantially on the youth market and is popular mainly because it is private, discrete, fast and inexpensive (free in fact). It’s also distance-independent and doesn’t require full attention to carry on a conversation – unlike a phone call. Of course, many of these characteristics would be nice for business use too, but inevitably there are problems in moving it to that general market.

The theory is that, by knowing who of your contacts are online at any particular time, being able to communicate with them easily and instantly (like having a quick word with whoever’s in the office at any particular time) can immensely speed up decision-making and productivity. An instant message conversation can be much quicker and easier than making a phone call. That also makes it ideal for collaborative purposes and, in conjunction with peer-to-peer networking, for virtual teams. A real boon for remote workers too.

Winning ways with wireless

What’s right for the US is not necessarily right for Europe though. Staying online for long periods of time is cheap in the US, but not in Europe and concerns about cost are one reason why instant messaging has not taken off so quickly here. It is growing, though, and again centred on the youth market and all this will undoubtedly change over time as unmetered access is introduced. In the meantime, though, there’s a new game in town - wireless.

European use of wireless far exceeds that in the US and far exceeds European Internet use as well. Short Message Service (SMS) use in Europe has literally exploded – to the point where there are now twice as many wireless messages sent daily in Europe as in the rest of the world combined – including the US. With SMS, nobody thinks twice about paying for the service either.

SMS is also centred on the youth market. In fact it has many of the attributes of instant messaging. Crucially, though, it lacks presence information. So can it be used in business? Yes, but it’s not brilliant – data capability is severely limited (so no prospect of sending attachments), text entry is also cumbersome but, even more importantly, mobiles can’t send messages to terminals on fixed networks very easily. If they could, presence information would be a lot more necessary – and that’s not available either.

This has led to the development of Wireless Instant Messaging (WIM) to overcome these shortcomings. The trouble is, that brings with it the need for standards – so that different networks can interwork. Even that different instant messaging implementations can interwork. This has put the spotlight on AOL, as the market leader in the fixed network, to work with everyone else – not something they've seemed keen to do right now. However, with the current pressures on wireless operators, they may just find the market moves on anyway.

So for wireless the prospect is of creating a discrete form of private communication for contacting anyone online or with a mobile. One that is always with you – in meetings, conferences, anywhere. That leaves just the message entry to sort out – either using easy aids to text entry or introducing the next leap forward: voice instant messaging.

Presence isn’t just presence

This raises a further opportunity for refinement, also included in the standards work. Since "online" in the future will mean using a wide variety of different types of terminal devices, it should cater for all types of communication other than just text messaging as well – including voice and, later, video. This means that presence information should include details of the device being used at the time. What about expanding it to include user preferences? Like – "I don’t want to receive any voice calls on my mobile this morning, but messages are OK". This has led to defining a difference between "presence" – what type of device or devices a user is currently online with – and "availability" – his personal preferences at that time for accepting calls. This has clear links to unified messaging. It can also be combined with other technologies (like SIP – Session Initiation Protocol) to create a powerful "find me" facility.

Then there’s location, but that’s another story.

All of this brings us full circle back to consumers. Services that include personal preferences could extend to the type of information users would like to receive as instant messages – stock quotes, online auctions, weather alerts, heavy traffic warnings. It could even extend in future to intelligent agents searching for best prices, as a front end to e-commerce services. These are inherently sticky services too – enhancing customer loyalty.

© e-principles 2001

Robin Duke-Woolley

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