RANT -- The distribution tactics of AOL have been annoying me for years. In the past five years, I've crossed hundreds of AOL CDs on planes, in magazines, and even included on my favorite music CD. The scheme was well timed, though. With everyone on the planet in a mad rush to get an email account to keep in touch with people they don't even like, AOL was nicely positioned to fulfill these needs and make a ton of cash. They did.
AOL recently annoyed me again when they included their Instant Messenger software in a recent version of Netscape Communicator. Now, I've no problem with Netscape
taking AOL's money just for shipping some bits with their already bloated groupware, but the program's behavior makes it almost feel like a virus.
For example, when you fire up the browser for the first time, you receive a clunky dialog asking if you'd like to sign up for Instant Messenger. What the hell is Instant Messenger? Why do I want it? I clicked "No, thank you." After a few days, the same dialog returned. Same information. Same reaction. This went on for months. I finally gave in and signed up simply because I was growing tired of clicking on that damned dialog. I'd no idea what instant messaging was, but I quickly found out the reasons behind AOL's persistence.
It takes a good solid ten seconds to grasp instant messaging. It's a simple program that lives in that little tray at the bottom right of your Windows toolbar. With an account and the names of a few friends who are also signed up, you can send, instantaneously, messages across the Internet. You're thinking "Yawn" and so was I, but forget about AOL's sloppy implementation and dig a little deeper.
The idea of an instant message has been around long before your cat had a web page - it's called a pager. Why in the world would paging over the Internet have me in a tizzy? Well, there were plenty of document formats before HTML took over the world. In fact, HTML is simply the bastard stepchild of SGML - what is the big deal? The big deal is protocols… standardized protocols like TCP/IP that allowed any type of computer to become part of the Internet. The same can hold true for instant messaging.
Microsoft recently proposed a "presence notification protocol" called RVP ('rendez-vous' protocol) which is intended to do for instant message what TCP/IP did for HTML - provide a common framework for any application similar to Instant Messenger to plug into. Suddenly, rather than individual proprietary solutions like Tribal Voices PowWow or Mirabilis' ICQ, we have the potential for a global paging network where the issue isn't what application your using.
The bad news is that this whole discussion may be moot point unless you have a really idea what instant messages are good for, other than sending speedy messages to friends. Fact is, while instant messaging is meant to be leaner than your average email that is exactly what an instant message is : very brief email that you don't tend to save. The good news is that it probably doesn't matter. Any business plan a company constructs to make money off instant messaging products is likely to change at the whim of a planet full of users connected to the Internet, using their product in a manner they never thought of.
editor's note: Shortly after this article was written, AOL purchased the company which produces the popular ICQ program, Mirabilis.
may 22, 1998
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