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Re: IM and Presence history

2006-11-28 10:35:34


--On Tuesday, 28 November, 2006 08:01 -0800 Dave Crocker
<dhc2(_at_)dcrocker(_dot_)net> wrote:

Subjectively and from my perspective, the present systems
"feel", and sometimes actually are, much more distributed.
But, yes, from the perspective you describe, we have advanced
very little in terms of basic functionality.

I believe that none of the proprietary IMs is anything other
than purely centralized.

Having to configure multiple IM accounts, to be able to talk
to different people, doesn't feel at all 'distributed' to me,
except in the bad sense of multiple, disconnected, centralized
services.

No question about it.  I was thinking partially about Jabber,
with interoperability between implementations and hosts, and
Skype with (at least as I understand it) a fairly distributed
architecture.  As to the rest, I assume that, sooner or later,
we will the same thing we saw with email: as functions and
capabilities diverge, gateways (and multiprotocol clients)
deliver only least common denominator services and get less
capable, and, well,... Know anyone with a large installed base
of ccMail users these days?

I think there is another interesting story in the fact that
multiprotocol clients seem more effective and useful, and much
more widely used and deployed, for IM than their equivalents
were for email.  Part of it is certainly related to the fact
that the usual email model is not-very-smart-MUA->
smarter-Submission-server, while the IM one, at least in terms
of what the user sees, is client->client.

  john


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