By Nick Patience
A summit was held last week in Melville, New York in an attempt to bring the various warring factions of the internet messaging market together. Unfortunately for the organizer, Pulver Corp, two of the main parties, America Online Inc and Yahoo Inc, failed to show, which devalued it somewhat. However, Jeff Pulver, CEO of Pulver still claims to have made fairly significant progress in clarifying the way forward for the market. It wasn’t easy though, and Pulver says it felt like mediating a Mid-East peace summit.
The main focus was the efforts within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to create a standard so that messages could be sent between IM providers using a single user name. The instant messaging and presence protocol (IMPP) working group is the body to which Microsoft Corp recently agreed to submit its IM protocols. Representatives of that group attended, as did Microsoft, Ericsson, FaceTime, Jabber.org, PeopleLink, Telia, MCI Worldcom, WeCanTalk.com, Tribal Voice and VocalTec among others. Interestingly, router vendors also attended, including Cisco Systems Inc, which shows how seriously IP-centric hardware and software vendors are taking IM.
Pulver put forward a proposal to the meeting whereby he compared the IM market to the email market 12 years ago before the numerous proprietary email systems provided public internet gateways. He suggested that the IM providers; router and other IP hardware vendors should build public IM gateways, like SMTP gateways for email. None of the attendees publicly supported the idea, but many did privately, claims Pulver. The groups agreed to meet again within six months.
