Back to the future
The first applications appeared as early as the 1970s on Control Data’s Plato mainframes and Digital Equipment Corp’s PDP-11 minicomputers.
It was rudimentary and required users to enter arcane instructions on a command line. The first graphical IM program, Zephyr, was developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987. But it took another decade before IM started becoming the mass communications tool it is today.
In November 1996, Israeli company Mirabilis introduced ICQ (“I seek you”), a free IM client for Windows computers. In a short time, Mirabilis signed up millions of users and, in June 1998, it was acquired by America Online, the giant US Internet service provider, for about US280m.
Since then, the market for IM clients has mushroomed. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo all have their own offerings, each with millions of users. Sadly, they’re mostly incompatible with one another — Google Talk users, for example, can’t send messages to people using MSN Messenger. This has led to the rise of a new generation of IM clients — Trillian, Gaim and Kopete are some of the more popular ones — that can communicate with multiple IM services by understanding all their protocols (the “languages” they use to exchange information with one another).
More recently, IM tools have begun to offer a lot more than just text-based chat. Some now provide Internet telephony and video conferencing capabilities as well as integration with Web-based e-mail systems. Google is probably the most advanced in this regard — it has built IM directly into its Gmail service.
IM’s popularity stems from its instantaneousness — unlike e-mail, communication takes place in near real time. Users can also see when their contacts are online — they have “presence” — making IM a more sociable way of communicating than e-mail.
That’s not to suggest, though, that e-mail is under threat. Far from it. E-mail volumes continue to rise — in part because of ever growing volumes of spam, or unsolicited advertising, but also because e-mail remains a key tool in business.
Television didn’t kill radio. The Internet didn’t kill voice telephony. E-mail, which was invented more than 40 years ago, is likely be with us for a long time still.
Inet-Bridge
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