The Free Software Store - Instant Messaging Software

Instant messaging is a great idea, and the proof of that is IM's widespread popularity around the world.

But it's also an idea that's been held back by more than a decade of narrow-minded corporate greed.

Open web standards like HTML and email have made the Net into a truly global communications network.

These open standards have arguably made the world a better place to live in. And it's also led to the creation of real wealth (through enhanced access to information, increased productivity, lower comms cost etc) wherever the Net has come into widespread use.

But instant messaging came to the party long after the fundamental open source web standards were formulated. And all the early IM players saw IM as a golden opportunity to use the Internet driven communications revolution to ultimately extract big bucks from the pockets of consumers.

So they all made their own IM products proprietary. And they've spent all the years since then waging a fruitless war trying to gain dominance over their rivals by giving away their IM software for free.

This has directly led to the IM mess we live in today, where very few products are interoperable and consumers have to download and install several of them to cover all possible bases.

And the deep irony of this situation is that the IM developers have probably lost money by pursuing this narrow corporate dream to dominate and then commercialise a narrow segment of the Net.

If - at the start - they'd offered up IM to become a free web standard (as Jabber and the IETF are now doing) and instead concentrated their efforts on developing products that use IM as a carrier for useful add-on services (as Skype has done) they'd probably all have been much better off.

And so would ordinary consumers.

Background: Instant messaging (IM) software allows you to communicate in real time with other people through your computer. This is usually done with text messages, but as broadband continues to expand around the world (and instant messaging software continues to improve) it can now also include communicating with sound and live video as well.

Surprisingly, perhaps, the first instant messaging software was invented in the 1960s. Most of the early instant messaging systems ran on proprietary computer networks and were developed to enhance communication between users. But instant messaging as we now know it took off in the mid-1990s in parallel with the rise of the Internet.

The first widely-used instant messenger on the Net was ICQ (released in 1996) and this was followed a year later by AOL Instant Messenger. But when it became apparent that instant messaging was very popular with the general public, these were soon followed by a raft of competing products from Microsoft, Yahoo and many, many others.

The end result is that today there are many excellent IM products on the market and virtually all of them are free. Why so? Because the single biggest drawback of instant messaging software at the present time is that thanks to corporate rivalries and some early patents, all IM software is still essentially proprietary.

That is to say, in order to communicate with someone else using instant messaging both parties need to be using the same IM software (not necessarily the same version, but certainly the same brand).

And this in turn means that for all practical purposes, most people are confined to picking what they hope is the most popular IM product or installing and using several IM products. And the situation is likely to stay this way until the companies that make IM software either make their different IM protocols interoperable (the sensible solution) or kill each other's products off (their wild and whacky dream).

Until then, here's where you can get the most popular Instant Messengers:

Windows Live Messenger (WLM - formerly known as MSN Messenger) is Microsoft's latest incarnation of its long-standing IM product. It runs on Windows XP and Vista and was first released at the end of 2005. According to Microsoft WLM had an active user base of 27.2 million in September 2006, which was roughly 20% of the global instant messaging market at that time. WLM - like many of Microsoft's products - has a long history of bugs and bugfixes and has gone through numerous upgrades since its first release. It's a popular target of hackers who spread worms, viruses and other malware through infected downloads passed across instant messaging networks or by directing users to "poison URLs" which instantly download malicious payloads into their PCs. All the same, one very big advantage of using WLM it is that it's interoperable with Yahoo! Messenger (which is used by another 20% of the IM market), giving WLM users a potential reach into 40% of the global IM user base. And another big advantage of WLM is that for in-house corporate use, it works seamlessly on any Microsoft network. Get Windows Live Messenger

Yahoo! Messenger was first released in 1998 and it was made interoperable with Microsoft's Windows Live Messenger in 2005-2006 when the two companies struck a deal to co-operate with their instant messaging products. Yahoo! Messenger offers slightly less features than WLM but in return, it runs on a wider range of Windows platforms (anything from Windows95 through to Windows XP) and there are also versions available for Mac and Linux. Yahoo! Messenger reported an active user base of around 22 million in September 2006, so it's interoperability with Windows Live Messenger means that using either product will give you access to around 40% of the global IM audience. Like WLM, Yahoo! Messenger has become the target of hackers in recent years and has had its share of security scares. But it's found a very loyal audience - partly through Yahoo's prompt upgrades when security holes have emerged - and it's robust enough to use for in-house corporate networks too. Get Yahoo! Messenger

AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) is the third major global IM software product next to Microsoft and Yahoo's offerings. And thanks to AOL's acquisition of instant messaging pioneer ICQ in 1998 (ICQ still continues to run as an independent company), the combined instant messaging market share of the two firms was estimated to be 68 million active users in September 2006. If this is so, then this would give AOL and ICQ a combined 55% share of the instant messaging market. But AOL's share alone was likely closer to 49% at that time. And while AIM and ICQ do plan to become fully interoperable soon in the same way that WLM and Yahoo! Messenger already are, that interoperability is still at beta stage. AOL Instant Messenger offers a similar spread of features (and has similar security holes) to WLM and Yahoo! Messenger, but AIM doesn't have quite the same mindshare as the other two outside the USA, where ICQ seems to be the preferred option. AIM does, however, make versions available that run on all editions of Windows from Win98 to Vista; provides Mac and Linux versions too (ICQ: Mac only); and amongst its users it has the same devoted loyalty that Yahoo! Messenger has attracted.

The growth of instant messaging has led to a convergence between VOIP (ie voice over IP - the ability to make phone calls over the Net) and traditional text messaging in the last few years. And this is probably best exemplified by Skype, which began as a pure VOIP product in late 2003 and has quickly mutated into an instant messaging product in the same way that WLM, Yahoo! Messenger and AOL/ICQ now allow messaging to phones. Skype was invented in Europe but was acquired by eBay in 2005. It allows users to make telephone calls over the Net to other Skype users for free, and to landlines and mobile phones for a fee. Skype's latest features include instant messaging, file transfers, SMS and video conferencing with more on the way. Skype runs on Windows 2000 and XP and in 2007 they released versions for Mac and Linux as well. Skype beat the big IM products to the punch on easy-to-use VOIP for everybody and gained a lot of mindshare because of it (they also became every telco's worst nightmare by waking the world up to the fact that telecommunications should really be as inexpensive as electricity). Where Skype will go in the future, though, is anyone's guess. Get Skype

Google's Google Talk instant messaging software was released in August 2005. Unlike other mainstream IM software, Google Talk runs on the Jabber protocol, which is an open-source instant messaging protocol being developed as a response to proprietary instant messaging standards by the Internet Engineering Task Force, amongst others. The IETF hope to one day make instant messaging as universally accessible as email (which is another open standard) and because of this Google Talk users can talk with any other instant messenger that uses Jabber's XMPP protocol (which is currently around 11 and growing). Like Skype (above), the future of Jabber remains to be seen. But the history of the Net shows that any attempt by anyone to try to "own" a piece of it by making things proprietary has always failed. So we think that Google Talk and Jabber could well have a big future ahead of them! Get GoogleTalk

This page last updated: 14-Aug-2008