Federation. No not the evil kind from Blakes 7 or the Star Trek goodie two shoes, but the federation of communications. It's one of the reasons that the internet really started to work. Look at the different operating systems, servers and applications that can all happily talk to each other. Every home, office and school with a router is a small network, connected to a bigger network, and so on and so on all the way up the pipe. So why is IM such a problem? Read on for my thoughts.

Compare the state of play with IM to that of Email. While email seems to be going the way of Gopher with the youth of today, there's no doubt that it was something that everyone expected to 'just work' online. And it does, no matter that the programs running email on the internet are all based on different technology and methodology.

Even when a new system arrived in the world of mobile email (the famously addictive Blackberry push email system), it sat within the regular email world, integrating itself nicely, and not creating a fuss (at least in the computer networks – in marketing and business it was a game changer). But there is seemingly no easy way to replicate this simplicity in the world of Instant Messaging – even though it is doing essentially the same thing as email, exchanging text.

Start any IM client that is not specifically designed for a single platform (e.g. the Skype java client on S60, the Windows Live Messenger on your PC, and so on) and you'll be forced to log on to all your IM platforms with separate user names and passwords for each. Why does it have to be this way?

The problem is when you have large behemoth systems that act as closed shops, and were notorious a few years ago to lock out any third party applications trying to access their systems. While the developers and users could see that an integrated client, or closer co-operation  between the networks, would improve the experience immensely, it never happened.

As a result, while IM on a smartphone still has its fans, it has never really taken off for the consumer (as opposed to the cutting edge users that run everything on their smartphone just because they can - you know who you are). Without a single one stop client, even Nokia's built-in chat client offers a bundle of technical choices and no easy way to say “get me on Yahoo!” (for example). Which is what you need for the mass market.

I think it's fair to say that because of these (historically) closed systems, we're not going to see a consumer grade “IM Client to Rule Them All” on a handset in the near future, and the communications method going to remain niche (on mobile).

What's needed in this modern internet world, where everyone has a (virtual) server and is happy to tinker around with new toys is an environment of federation, of cross platform compatibility and of data exchange. Much as that which grew up around email.

The likeliest area to benefit from (or fall foul of, due to politics) federation is the “Live Status” message. Made popular by Twitter and its simple question of “what are you doing?”, the idea has taken on a life of its own on various social networks, such as Facebook. Developers (and the companies) are exploring shared access, programming interfaces and ways to share your status messages and the ensuing conversations.

Will the ecosystem make the same mistakes as IM or navigate the waters like email. Time will tell, but the early indications are that the latter is more likely. See last year's launch of Laconica, an open source microblogging server that uses a publishing standard called OpenMicroBlogging. That gives everyone a template to work from. Whether the big boys will open up and provide interoperability... that's the key question.

-- Ewan Spence, May 2009.