Peter Griffin: Instant messaging about to become even more addictive

If email has replaced traditional letter writing for a lot of us, instant messaging has just about replaced email.

Why type a casual email message to a friend or colleague when you can chat to them online and in real time via an online messaging service?

Everyone's doing it. An estimated 12.5 billion messages are sent each day via these messaging services. That's a lot of internet chatter.

MSN Messenger has become one of the essential web services for me. I use it dozens of times every day. It's so effective that I regularly have to turn it off or switch my status to "offline" so I can get some work done.

The more people on your messaging buddy list and the more time zones they are spread across, the greater the likelihood of you spending the day gossiping with mates around the world.

Instant messaging services are so useful that a lot of companies don't allow them to be accessed on their computer systems as they fear worker productivity will plunge as a result. They're absolutely right.

But messenger services are widely used in a business capacity.

The fact is, MSN Messenger and its rivals are very efficient work tools, especially when you take advantage of the document and photo-swapping functions and the internet telephony features.

All of that makes the news that MSN Messenger will next year become interoperable with Yahoo Messenger very heartening indeed.

While AOL Instant Messenger is probably still the single biggest messaging system, it's a very American-centric service and not widely used in this part of the world, unlike MSN and Yahoo.

AOL was, however, one of the first into the messaging game and the first to use to term "instant messaging".

That's why I get served with a threatening letter from AOL's New York-based law firm every time I talk about instant messaging and don't mention AOL's name.

The Microsoft-Yahoo tie-up is very bad news for AOL, which has been talking about becoming interoperable with Microsoft for years but has never been able to put a deal together.

The one big downside to messaging so far has been that contacts can be spread across the main four or five major rival messaging platforms and it's been impossible to create one unified contact list without using third party software such as Trillian.

The integrated Microsoft and Yahoo user base will connect as many as 275 million people, the companies say.

The services will come together in the second quarter of next year and include shared instant messaging, PC-to-PC internet calls and contact lists. You'll even be able to share emoticons, those little animated graphics that let you message with feeling, or at least something other than bland text.

Excluded from the integration at the moment is the web camera function of the messaging platforms and photo sharing. But it's just a matter of time before they are brought into the fold as well.

I tried AOL Instant Messenger and didn't like it. I can't stand ICQ either. It's clunky and none of my contacts use it. I've really taken to using MSN Messenger on my handheld computer over the mobile phone network. It works like a treat and really freaks people out when I say I'm messaging from a restaurant.

But what of Skype's popular messaging service and Google Talk, which was launched in August? Will they integrate with Microsoft and Yahoo to grow the messaging pond even further?

These services are more problematic. Google represents more of a threat to Microsoft than Yahoo and is increasingly doing things that are designed to directly challenge the biggest software maker in the world. Google's desktop and internet search technology, for example, competes directly with Microsoft's.

It's also directly challenging the company with its Google Talk messaging, and seeking to integrate its services into software that acts as an alternative to the world's most popular productivity software suite, Microsoft Office.

A tie-up announced last week between Google and Sun Microsystems will allow downloaders of Sun's Star Office software to incorporate the Google toolbar into it.

Google's boundless aspirations may make an uneasy Microsoft reticent about adding its messaging user base to the mix, though Google claims to be interested in operability. Whether it is that keen about becoming interoperable with Skype, which it is going after with Google Talk, may be a different story. The security for the integrated services will apparently comprise a standard called SIMPLE, a version of session initiation protocol (SIP) that is widely used in internet telephony and adapted for instant messaging.

Simple has two modes to cover the two-way calling and straight messaging. With the messaging services, we often send sensitive information by increasingly being targeted by virus writers, security is an issue that can't be overlooked.

www.aim.com

messenger.msn.com

messenger.yahoo.com

www.google.com/talk/

www.skype.com