Instant messaging has become a part of daily life on the web. I use several different services depending on what I want to do and who I want to talk to. AIM is great for keeping in touch with old friends, Meebo or eBuddy for signing on anywhere, and Skype for business interactions. I use these different services because of their strengths in certain key features. Companies like Meebo, Skype, Wablet, and AOL-acquired Userplane are pushing these features forward with the next generation of instant messaging on the web.
Real time communication is one of the most innovative sectors on the web today. Below are some of the big ideas emerging in web instant messaging as it stands today and the services that exemplify them.
1. Interoperability
After the initial success of AIM and ICQ, several other chat services popped up. Services like Trillian, Gaim, Adium and Miranda developed hacks to communicate across the different protocols. After a period of “cat and mouse” where AOL fought interoperability by making small changes to AIM, cross-platform interoperability has become a standard feature in most new chat programs. Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger announced interoperability this summer. AOL now has an open development API and Google Talk runs on the open Jabber protocol. Clearly, open standards are here to stay.
2. In-Browser Chat
AIM Express was an early version of chat programs that split away from a downloadable client and ran in your web browser instead. Services like Meebo and eBuddy have developed richer user interfaces by using AJAX and bridging chat protocols. Sequoia backed Meebo (rumored $3-4 million), and Lowland funded eBuddy (5 million Euro) continue to slug is out over this space. Meebo branched out even further by allowing embeddable chat on any website through their MeeboMe widget. Meebo has had steady growth since we covered their numbers last December. Daily logins and message volume have grown 5 times over, at 1.2 million logins and 70 million messages per day. Meebo claims 4.5 million monthly uniques and 700,000 Meebo user accounts. With the uptake in social sites, browser-based IM has brought chat to the places users are on the web.
3. Location Based Chat
Instant messaging programs connect people across the internet. Newer programs like RadiusIM and Meetro, connect people by their real-world location. RadiusIM is an AJAX application, while Meetro is a downloadable client. Both allow you to fill out your location and profile as a way to meet new people in your area, or even another country. Unlike the other developments in chat, location based IM hasn’t seen heavy adoption on other platforms, which continue to connect people based on a user generated buddy list.
4. Flexible Identities
As web personal profiles have grown on the web, so has the need to separate your private and professional faces. While users can handle this problem through managing various IM handles, Flash-based Wablet (our coverage) made profiling a central feature in it’s system. Wablet allows you to create multiple personas with different profiles. You can then embed these chat windows on the web and control which persona each visitor sees. In the near future, Wablet is incorporating OpenID. Chat service ScribbleHere currently works with OpenID.
5. Contextual Chat
Several new start-ups have popped up and changed the context of instant messaging from buddy lists to websites and interests. While similar to the old IRC chat rooms by basing conversations around topics, companies like Me.dium, Geesee, the newly launched InCircles, OthersOnline, and 3bubbles have incorporated your location on the web into chat in different degrees.
3Bubbles is an embed that adds a post specific chat window to every blog post. GeeSee goes a step further and connects users across sites based on tags so, for example, all technology blogs can share a common chat room. InCircles, which is embedded for testing here, operates similarly but is optimized for blog sidebars. OthersOnline and Me.dium incorporate surfing habits to connect users of similar interests. Both are browser plugins. OthersOnline focuses on connecting people who frequent the same websites and have similar profiles, listing similar users in drop-down menus. Me.dium is a bit more anonymous in their approach, connecting users by handle based solely on their presence at related websites. Your relationship to your friends and other surfers is displayed on a “radar” map, which shows you other users visiting the site your on or others like it.
6. Rich Media Chat
Web cams and microphones have been on the web for a while, but the growth broadband, VOIP standards, and mainstream incorporation through services like Skype, Google Talk, and Yahoo! Messenger have expanded their use in chat programs. Skype and Yahoo! support calling to land lines and mobile phones (Skype is free until the end of the year). PalTalk creates voice chat rooms that can host conversations between thousands of people together at once. While voice and video does not lend itself to simultaneous conversations many IM users carry on, rich media integration brings a subtleness and depth absent from text-based IM.
http://gabbly.c.../techcrunch.com
Here is another one to consider
Just, AWESOME
Good call, Gably is great for page specific chat. Scales well, good program. There are any number of examples not included in this overview.
I think you should have talk about Stickam also. I know it isn’t exactly a “web 2.0″ start-up but they their job very well in video/voice chat, even with big rooms.
It’s weird that you didn’t mention AIM and MSN messenger but put Google Talk in the rich media chat.
Great Ideas.
It’s good to see read/writeweb style analysis posts on Techcrunch; this sums up everything very well.. Thanx!
the minds and imaginations of authors as long as there has been written …
IMs may indeed be ubiquitous and they can be very useful especially when combined with voip – however i found myself with my desktop cluttered with yahoo/skype/msn/aim, with different contacts on different IM systems. ridiculous. have consolidated them all to yahoo now – especially easy now it supports msn users. real-time chat is still woefully under utilised in business and there is great scope in this area, especially when incorporating contextual chat/links – lots of potential here. am surprised the webex type boys haven’t moved into this space more – or have they?
Not mentioned in your article are the many companies offering proactive web chats with visitors to their web shops.
Scenario: someone visits your online shop, appears to be ready to purchase, but breaks off from purchasing for some reason. A web chat operator then PUSHES a chat to this potential customer, attempting to persuade him to buy, and answering any questions making him hesitant to purchase.
This is an exciting sales channel not given much attention at the present time. Nonetheless, it IS currently being used by a lot of enterprise companies doing business online.
I want something like Contextual Chat where i can have chat software on my web and i can chat with some desktop client software like gaim. Can anyone help me ?
I would have said ‘SEVEN biggest new ideas in chat’ as I feel the most innovative idea of all to do with instant messaging has been omitted: intelligent chat bots. This reperesents the most fascinating area of IM – an automated robot with whom you can converse in natural language and depending on which ‘bot’ you use – can offer you a number of services like news, rss feeds, and content integration with flights and amazon to name a few. chat@insidemessenger.com offers the richest and most innovative set of services together with a friendly natural language buddy. There are plenty others out there, but I feel this area of instant messaging deserves a mention don’t you? The technology of these IM bots is rapidly advancing and are bound to make a profound impact on our online habits in the near future.
Nice post Nick. Definitely lots of action in the chat space right now. Meebo started something. Tangler is a bit different and we’re still testing it to see exactly how it fits in.
Regardless, I just hope one day I can narrow down my communication tools to under 20!
Mick Liubinskas
see this talk-deal-pay service http://www.siteheart.com
it seems that 3bubbles doesn’t exist anymore? the domain is now redirected to yes.com
I didnt find thing that i need…
[url=http://yahoo.com]yahoo[/url]
Meebo has transformed the way we use messengers, by taking the IMs from client-server model to the Web.
Its not too far, before we get back to “dumb terminal” era. All we would need is a browser, to do all our tasks.
I have been using Meebo since it launched. I gotta say those guys did a very nice job. I have never used eBuddy but will definitely check it out.
Many were not mentioned such as:
http://www.koolim.com
http://www.iloveim.com
http://www.messengerfx.com
Dont forget the chat is going to intergrated into the latest products for the gnome project.
Telepathy allows for all applications to share a single instant messaging and VoIP interface.
http://telepath...sktop.org/wiki/
This then leads to extensions like abiword and inkscape that can do shared documents using IM as the transport.
http://uwog.net/news/?p=29
http://www.thel...log/?postid=335
So you want sombody to add something to your document give them a shout on your VoIP connection and then click on the share document and you can edit the document together.
dude, i think you missed number SEVEN: COMMUNICATION AGNOSTIC MEDIUMS – by this, i mean that ‘chat’ is just one thing we do, and companies are realizing this…you might be using email, im or talk (voip) and in a client like yahoo or gmail and so on, users might spontaneously transition from chat to im to voip (leave a message for offline user, etc) – this is a HUGE change in how the platform works, and the major portals are pursuing this aggressively…in reality, you should be able to ‘connect’ with any contact, and during communications decide to move on the fly from phone to im (hey, gotta take this other call, gonna kick you to im) or from im to email (i have more to say here, gonna compose and send to you, get back to me later because i’m going off chat)….
for serious collaboration and productivity, communication agnostic mediums are the killer idea, and in that context chat is just one piece (my opinion)
I agree with Mike, certainly one of the biggest developments in chat is intelligent IMBots.
I’m sure this will be the next generation of chat startups to be seen on TechCrunch.
For anyone interested in some technology for this check out http://www.importal.org/
“Easy, rapid development of applications (client and server) that provide live and ubiquitous access to content, systems and people; using secure, instant messaging protocols (XMPP).”
I really like incircles. implemented on the tech show and scriggity sites! thanks
IM is likely one of the three most popular communication applications on your computer/pda today – along with Email and a web browser.
The new ideas in chat are around the leveraging of key differentiators of IM as infrastructure rather than as an application. I say new ideas, but I really mean is new recognition of the real power of IM – beyond chat.
Traditional IM/Chat has been about people communicating with other people – the real/enduring money (*) is in integrating IM with work flow – i.e Applications chatting with people, and people chatting with applications.
* Presence, Availability and Location tracking
This provides an application the ability to find the right person at the right time and assign tasks to them based on their real-time status. Examples are as simple as finding an expert user for e-learning, or assigning a field service request to the nearest technician.
A variant of this is “Managed person to person communication” – you wish to converse with the first “available” person who fits a skill or role – as in a call center/help desk environment
*Bi-directional Closed-loop Communication
Unlike email or the traditional web – IM provides an opportunity for the recipient to interact in real-time with the message just received. If the sender is an application, decisions can be used to speed up work flow. We have developed IM as a channel for “humans in the loop” application for over 6 years.
*Latency
IM is practically the fastest way to notify someone of the occurrence of an event. Unlike a web page, where you have to clairvoyant to know if new information has been made available, or email which can be store and forward – IM is delivered with sub second latency to a user that is online.
I note the recent spate of interest in RSS as the “in-box for the web” and its use as a notification technology. Compared to the use of IM for the same task (ask us for a demo), RSS might soon be termed “Really Slow Syndication”
Web reduce delays from weeks to days, Email and RSS from days to hours and minutes, while IM reduce it from minutes to seconds. If that kind of advantage matters, check out http://www.vayusphere.com
–pushpendra
Pushpendra Mohta
Vayusphere
Man, I hope someone other than paltalk is successful in the space of Rich Media Chat. Paltalk = censorvilleX20.
I’ve never really seen an example of active censorship on any chat service other than Paltalk. Hell, they’re one of the places that will ban you for saying something bad about Paltalk itself. May they burn in Hades.
google talk is good for interoperation
try talking to someone from livejournals instant messenger (its jabber based)
from gtalk
it works
I am a huge fan of these IM tools and use them daily for outsourcing projects. However, recently I have become very weary of their effectiveness. In my mind nothing will ever beat sitting around the board table with a crap load of white boards at your disposal. It may sound very backwards which is weird because I am usually all about skype/webex etc, but my recent experiences have turned me sour. Just a thought. Fantastic post though!
Carl,
WebEx has, through a partnership with AIM called AIM Pro. (http://aimpro.p...rvices.aol.com/).
As for the rest of the article, I agree that there’s a lot going on in the space. It’s like mail before GMail came out; a lot of people thought that the innovation was over, but there’s still a lot of life left in this medium.
For example, if you haven’t seen what we’re doing over with AIM recently, come check it out. AIM 6 has location, and on the developer site (developer.aim.com), you can get access to the new Web IM tools to embed chat and buddy lists on your own web pages. Or, build your own bots and make them available to any AIM user. Pretty cool stuff.
Great post and agree that it’s nice to see the analysis here.
This is the kiss of death for business productivity. I spend so much time chatting to friends though the three IM’s that I have, I don’t have time to work!
Nick, Good assessment of the chat-sphere so far. Although our goal at Me.dium is much broader than chat, chat is certainly an important part of the mix. If any of your readers would like to try it out, they can download Me.dium with the following invite code: TC2006ME (all caps).
Thanks again for the mention.
I love Meebo and their MeeboMe widgets!
Nick,
With due respect, technically speaking, none of the companies listed under #1 “interoperability” provide IM interoperability.
Interoperability on the network level is when I call your phone number (with Cingular) from my phone (which is with Verison).
Gaim, Trillian and Jabber family clients ask you to create new accounts on foreign networks before you could chat on those networks. An equivalent of you getting a brand new phone number with Verizon so that you and I could talk.
Just because one could get an “all-in-one” instant messenger AND create 5 instant messaging accounts on AOL, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN and Jabber/Google does not make that instant messenger “interoperable”.
This story had been submitted to Digg
http://www.digg...w_Ideas_In_Chat
This incircles idea “ROCKS”!!!!!!!!
What about campfire?
It seems to already be overrun with annoying trolls. Web chat sounds great, but every time I’ve seen it in real life, the outcome is bad…
Wow!! – We had an incredible response to the inCircles clients today. The InCircles team want say a very big THANK YOU to you all and we appreciate all your great compliments and feedback. We’ve had an enormous number of new sites and blogs sign up today and hundreds of requests for custom clients for larger sites. Our ‘beta’ will have many of the features that many of you are asking for too – we look forward to working with many of you in the near future.
Thanks again,
The InCircles Team
Mike’s idea about Intelligent Chat Robots seems promising. How far are we from really useful Intelligent Chat Robots?
The trillian link is not the actual Trillian Chat client site. The proper links is: http://trillian.cc
Although i completely agree with the article
TRILLIAN FTMFW it is the best thing out there, and the pro version makes it that much more, i use it for everything from skype to msn, and with the skinning and plugins features the possibilities are endless
Speaking as an Adium developer, I can safely say that AOL does *not* have an open API for AIM. The license on it is so horrendously restrictive as to make it basically useless for anything except bots.
Also: my 7) on that list would be systemwide presence integration. See http://telepath...freedesktop.org, or the OLPC project, or iChat’s InstantMessage.framework. Combined with a couple of other emerging technologies (jingle+link-local xmpp is one specific combination of interest) this has the potential to truly rebuild the way collaborative computing works.
1. Interop between systems is over-stated and still a major mess. And it’s now got an additional level of complexity that we need voice and video interop as well as chat. Googletalk’s Libjingle announcement from a year ago should have helped here but it hasn’t come to anything.
2. Group chat is re-inventing IRC. It’s yet another few-to-few communication mechanism but now almost real time. And along with Group Chat, group voice either as few-to-few conference calls or one-to-many broadcast like Skypecasts.
3. Most of the IM systems have an API. But there are surprisingly few IM-Web mashups. Why is that?
This is all well and good for the users, but what happens when businesses conduct their transactions via IM? How do these get recorded to use as evidence the transaction or decision has occurred?
heres another one which I developed out of interest. Matrix can convert any web site into a community and can connect people browsing that site together globally. Check out http://www.matrixconnects.com
I installed Interaction (www.interactionchat.com) on my web site and it’s pretty good, I can chat with people who access my web site. I’m using the free version.
Google Talk users can make calls to telephones, MSN and SIP phones thru public services like http://www.gtalk2voip.com
WebEx has, through a partnership with AIM called AIM Pro.
I was wondering want WebEx is going to do next as Adobe’s “Connect” sharing (nee “Macromedia Breeze”) will clean their clock. It is a much better demostration and sharing tool.
I’m surprised that Adobe hasn’t come out with an IM client yet. It wouldn’t take much to add it to Acrobat, much like Breeze was added.
Havent you all wasted enough time on chat. Sure, I know IM has its place but most of you abuse it and dont know your limits. The bigest idea in chat should be that people realize what a time waster it is and how much it interrups anyone’s basic focus.
sinick – That might just be the dumbest post I’ve read all year. Define waste of time? Let’s explore other wastes of time – a $40 Billion dollar ‘Games’ market – $20B music market – DVDs, TV, entertainment ETC ETC ETC
If you’re engaged enough in something you become a consumer of it. I think you are one of the few people who can’t grasp this new generation of interactivity. Did you bitch about Internet too in 1996?
Nick, great write-up. Thanks for the mention of Others Online — we are flattered.
And thanks to all who’ve downloaded our current beta release. Lots going on here, and we’re not quite ready for primetime yet, but we look forward to a proper launch and a much more complete user experience next quarter.
Marshall – I see one of your six is “Rich Media Chat” – and within it you mention Skype, Google Talk, Yahoo! and even PalTalk. While this comment is perhaps a bit self-serving, we agree that the combination of chat integrated with voice falls right under this category, but the icing on the cake in terms of any chat or chat/voice integration feature in this environment is the ability to moderate. TalkShoe.com provides the “host” with the capability to control the conversations, but enabling the host to mute/un-mute any one, two or upto all telephone lines (regular/cellular/VoIP), as well as the ability to mute/un-mute any one in the text Chat domain as well; from the tens to hundreds to thousands of users. This leads to quality discussions in the voice and text chat domain, and also frustrates the occassional predators, obscenity-spewing actors, and spammers that typically ruin any voice or chat experience on the web. Brian (the TalkShoe team)