I came across some thoughtful commentaries around IM battlestations. DrunkenBlog declares IM war.

Within the last few weeks, there appears to have been a meeting between MSN, Yahoo and AOL. They’d all been talking amongst themselves – and sparsely with each other – about how to respond to Google, but were still trying to make up their minds.

This meeting made it official: It’s three against one, indirectly. Specifically, sometime in the near future, all three services are going to be releasing new versions of their software and “Sunsetting” all older versions of their Windows clients. From what I can tell, Microsoft is spearheading the initiative, but the other two are going to follow. Generally, each service has its own protocols and they do well to keep older versions in mind when they release a new client, because they want as many people on the network as possible. However, that’s going to be going away – you’ll use the new client, or you won’t chat on their networks.

I agree with Fabian Buch who says :

But I’m sure I’m not the only one asking “do we need yet another IM?”, as an IM user who has already Yahoo!IM, MSN, AIM, ICQ, Jabber and Skype. Do we/I really need yet anotherone?

The answer is clearly: NO. There’s only one case in which the answer could be “yes”: it’d have to replace all other IMs, keeping me connected to all my existing friends. That means it’d have to communicate with all networks.

And Nugget, in a LiveJournal entry, towards the end of a longish post on how IM clients have evolved (not much in the last decade he feels), suggests:

We need to move instant messaging away from these archaic closed networks and to an open protocol that can scale and allows us to move past implementation development to focus instead on areas where actual innovation can occur.

For now I'm discouraging people from switching to Google's new IM network. It simply does not offer enough benefit to justify further fragmentation of the IM world. We're probably never going to see meaningful innovation and advancement of IM utility until we find a way to get past the horrible plumbing that exists underneath, and Google Talk as it exists today is doing more harm to that goal than good. No amount of vapor or rumor regarding gee-whiz VoIP or search capabilities is going to offset the closed nature of their new network for me.

What struck me is none of these mention Skype. Skype has changed how we approach IM today. The big prize will be as Om says :

.... in the longer term, the evolution of newer “thin clients” that fit into the emerging economy lifestyles will also start to use voice for free. As a word of caution, it is not going to be today, or tomorrow or even two years from now. This is a long drawn out process, that should take somewhere between five to ten years. But like a big lumbering boxer, who has taken many a few punches, its going to slowly slide before hitting the deck. There are a handful of reasons for that. If you took into account the current user patterns, no one except Skype is getting meaningful “voice” traffic. (That’s because Skype is viewed as a free voice service with IM features, and not the other way around.) However, as many of the younger users start to get comfortable with Voice over IM, the voice traffic over IM networks is going to increase.

Reading all these posts on the battlestations IM operators might adopt makes me wonder whether they (the IM operators) have it all wrong somewhere. Do they really understand devices? Will users really move to voice the same way as they use chat? The IM clients aren't designed from the first instance, to do voice. Think about the call on the application - what does a voice call look like on the Skype client, on the MSN client or on Yahoo Messenger? Add Skype to a phone, you are already trained to use it - click to call straight from the buddy list. Add MSN to a phone... click.. oops text message... oops click... accept call? IM clients are not training their users for migration to small voice driven devices with simplified interfaces. Is IM then the right format for thin clients which offer mobility?

Skype could lose its way if it joins the ranks ... the latest beta version seems to have added more fun in the chat features - new emoticons and more expressive pictures, for instance.