The Next Big Killer App Is… Instant Messaging
by Ewan Spence
So here I am in Monaco, and reading the tea leaves from presentations from the likes of Vodafone, AOL and MSN. The operators and internet service providers seem to have decided that the near future of mobile is… Instant Messaging. Admittedly the clue is probably in the title of the conference (Global Messaging 2007), but the volume of rhetoric is incredible.
The problem, of course, is how exactly you define an instant message, and how it is delivered.
The loose groupings of instant messaging can come from a number of sources. Handset-derived SMS is the obvious one, but you also have MMS users. And traditional IM from AIM, MSN and Yahoo have now been joined by Skype in the recent past, and where would you place both traditional email (which can be regarded as a message, and is clearly part of any new messaging strategy) and the short messages passed through services such as Facebook or MySpace? So the challenge in the definition is one that is more than flippant.
Once you collect all of these, you have the challenge of presenting them to the end-users in an intelligent and navigable way; otherwise it might get a touch overwhelming. Not everyone is going to use all the services, so it needs to be selectable and adapt itself to fit the user. It needs to be clear, and fast (instant messaging is, after all, instant).
And it needs to create a new revenue stream for the operators. Every new service has to do that – and this is where they are having their major headache. Discounting a ‘pay per every message you send’ approach which would be commercial suicide (nobody would have any confidence in what their final bill would be), the obvious answer is bandwidth usage. If you have 50 people on your contact list and you change your status from ‘Away’ to ‘Available,’ that’s 50 packets of info to be sent out to your contact list – something SMS cannot cope with at any pace, and something that, if not carefully managed, could affect network performance. Just look at the slowdown at New Year with all the “Happy 2007!” messages being sent and imagine the scenarios the networks can paint of doom and gloom.
Probably the only workable strategy is some sort of flat rate addition to a data bundle, but wrapping up the future of IM in a debate of flat rate data is not going to help it get out to the mass market anytime soon.
What’s most interesting is that while the operators continue to try and work out how they can do this within both their network structure and through their billing computers, solutions for Symbian users are already available, from Nokia’s bundling of an IM Client in S60 to Java versions of Jabber clients and ports of open source clients (even old dinosaurs such as IRC are easily available). If the industry is looking at IM being the ‘next big thing’ then they seem to have forgotten that (a) it’s already here and (b) the heavy users of IM are not going to choose a solution from a carrier that costs more than they are currently paying.
IM may shift a new iteration of handsets, but it’s not the next big thing to take the mobile world by storm.