The End of Free Instant Messaging?
NOTE: After posting this entry I later found out that the contents were based on a false assumption on my part (see this entry for more details). I am keeping this entry here for historical and ethical purposes.
The kings of greed over at Microsoft are calling it quits in the free instant messaging business, having steadily lost customers to competing products from AOL and Yahoo.
According to an AP Business Wire article, the Redmond titan is blaming the decision on spam, stalkers, pedophiles, and everything else except market share. Most seem to agree that the plan — which will shutter chat access in all countries except Canada, the U.S., Japan, and Brazil and forcing non-MSN users to pay for the service — has more to do with making the MSN division stop hemorrhaging cash than with protecting innocent chatters from the scum of the Internet.
Meanwhile, Yahoo swears up and down that their own recent forced upgrade had everything to do with improving service quality. For now I feel inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt based on their history. But you can bet that if Microsoft’s play for IM payola pans out, AOL and Yahoo won’t take long to follow suit with their own fee-for-service lock-downs.
As someone who was there for the giddy boom years of the Internet, when information still wanted to be free and anything was possible with a little imagination, it makes my heart sink to watch the inevitable corporate slicing and dicing of the world’s greatest, most democratic communications medium. There is hope for free IM, however — the open source IM platform Jabber recently surpassed ICQ in number of users to become the number four instant messaging protocol on the Net. Jabber is based on XML, an open standard developed by the W3C to facilitate open data exchange. Free for all, and with plenty of cool features and room for extension, Jabber may have a bright future ahead of it.
