XplanaZine

For years people have talked about chat. For years vendors have been including it in their learning management systems. Just like a classrom, right? All those people gathered in one place to talk chaotically and with little or no control, even for the moderator.

Well, the vote is in on the real usefulness of chat in business and education, and it’s not good. It has useful qualitites but only in extremely limited contexts — with limited number of peoples, tight moderated control, and with narrow time limits or topics of conversation. And, when you limit it to those parameters, you will have better results with asynchronous message boards (all you lose is the “real-time” of chat but you gain much greater flexibility). And, as Rich Shupe at FMA always reminds me, synchronous isn’t all it’s cracked up to be if that means choking all of your available bandwidth and server capacity.

IM, on the other hand, has exploded and is continuing to grow. It is more useful than chat because it is personal, allows the user full control of the system, and provides incredible synchronous communication with little bandwidth usage. In fact, IM is such a disruptive technology that it has come to dominate collaborative work and communication in spite of the inherent security flaws in public instant messaging. And now, like all great technologies, userswant it integrated into every aspect of their technological lives. In response to the clamoring, we’ve seen repeated announcements regarding the interoperability of different IM clients, better integration of IM into corporate frameworks (very concerned with security), and making IM a central and collaborative feature of ERP products.

On the instant messaging front, mobile phone company Ericsson on Wednesday announced that it will begin testing a wireless instant messaging system that will interoperate with those of other providers. Ericsson is claiming that its IMPS network will be interoperable for all mobile users regardless of service provider, network or device manufacturer. This means Ericsson will provide users with a one-stop solution for public IM which will be really nice for all those people using a combination of AIM, MSN, ICQ, and Yahoo.

Not to be left out of the loop, Web standards group OASIS is working to devise a model that could bolster the reliability of Web services messages. OASIS’ planned model will allow companies to choose a number of message delivery options. For example, a company can request acknowledgement of a message’s arrival or automatically resend an undelivered message. The messaging capabilities will be defined within the existing Web Services Definition Language (WSDL) standard, and the message formats will be specified within the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) standard.

And what about the Big Three (in IM, at least)? One of Microsoft’s own, David, Gurle says that they will witness a decline in their control over IM as corporate IT managers get more involved with the service. “Today, enterprises are at the mercy of many service providers,” Gurle said. “That’s going to change.” Naturally, this is leading to a rush by the leading commersial IM providers to develop corporate-specific IM serices that are security-friendly and that work well within the constraints of firewalls. Indeed, IM is big and getting bigger. As we watch the convergence of IM and Weblogs, and begin to realize the potential of user-selected collaborative information and communication frameworks, the future becomes more than a bit dizzying.

And learning system vendors? They’re still playing with chat. They will have arrived successfully when they begin integrating RSS 1.0 standards, XML, and full IM into their products. That’s an integration we’ll finally be able to live (and teach/learn) with.