--On Friday, 24 November, 2006 10:30 -0500 Eric Burger
<eburger(_at_)cantata(_dot_)com> wrote:
Or, the reality that with (at the time) a single dominant
network provider made the inter-networking point moot.
Eric, you are being a little cryptic, perhaps unintentionally.
What do you mean about a single dominant provider and at what
time?
I would add an observation to Dave's about possibly different
sets of needs by reminding everyone that considerable IM
functionality (other than presence) isn't new. We had
SEND/SOML/SAML from the beginning of SMTP, even though they had,
IMO, a very short practical lifespan and, even then, were used
only in limited communities. We also we had a couple of flavors
of the "talk" protocol which were certainly heavily used in some
places. "Talk" involved a conversational session while SEND et
al was closer to what we would call a short message service
today. Off the Internet and in the land of BITNET/EARN/etc.,
there was also an end to end short message protocol and
mechanism that was extensively used.
None of these supported a presence mechanism in the sense that
we understand it today. As a result, one had to bind a user
identity to a target host in much the way SMTP does, rather than
having someone attach to the network at any point and announce
presence and, implicitly, location. It is arguably those
presence and mobility mechanisms and not IM itself that is the
recent development. To the degree to which those mechanisms are
what caused IM to take off, perhaps that reinforces Dave's view
of different services serving different needs.
john
On 11/22/06 11:13 AM, "Dave Crocker" <dhc2(_at_)dcrocker(_dot_)net> wrote:
Harald Alvestrand wrote:
There were no alternatives to SMTP on an IP network until
Instant Messaging came along.
not since X.400 over X.25 died, no. I thought you were older
than that....
And there were all of the individual providers that Michael
cited, such as MCI Mail.
but can be seen in IM, and may likely show up in other
forms of communication. Much of this is simply the nature
of software.
It has nothing to do with software and everything to do
with architecture. IM networks have less problems because
all the participants share a relationship with the IM
service providers.
It *is* interesting that the diversity of disconnected email
services was viewed
as a basic problem to solve, whereas most of the Internet
user community does not seem to feel the same pressure to
unify IM.
Hmmm. Maybe IM satisfies a different set of needs than does
email. So we had better be a bit cautious about trying to
generalize implications between them.
d/
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