The following was written in response to a posting at Jabber, Inc.’s Filaments Blog. The original article is available at:

http://blog.jabber.com/filaments/2007/03/05/big-content-see-viacom-v-goolge/

Dave, I agree with you wholeheartedly that providing context to users in the modern networked computing environment is essential. Although the model has been for communication to occur between individuals or groups with previously existing relationships, context cues will become increasingly important when we begin to interact with strangers we have located in search of expertise or to provide real-time information in a fast paced environment.

No offense, but I think you are overselling when you state that “instant messaging IS the desktop”. If that is true, then what the heck are we using the desktop for? There are a variety of other appliances better suited to providing IM and presence information. Mobile devices could very easily fill this role and would likely provide more accurate presence information.

True, the desktop IM client is as strong as it has ever been, but in a world where applications are being pushed into web-based delivery mechanisms I think it unreasonable to believe that IM clients won’t go the same way. This sentiment is echoed in a number of responses to the Om article you quoted above.

After all, the power of what we are discussing here is not in the messaging, but rather in the presence engine. The Jabber presence engine is quite robust, but still gains its presence information from the one (historically unreliable) source, the user. Context information provided by today’s IM applications is no more accurate or reliable than when AIM first hit the market. It is still dominated by “online” or “away” type models with very few clues from the user’s actual environment.

I am confident that this will change in time and that Jabber, Inc. will be at the forefront of this change, but in order to get there we must recognize the limitations of where we are today.