A new generation of instant-messaging services hopes to capitalize on two of the Internet's greatest strengths, combining the instantaneous nature of chat with the personalization of email. According to a Yankee Group survey last year, 69 percent of Net users count email as the most important online application, with chat coming in as the second-most compelling reason to stay online, at 27 percent. This week's launch of PeopleLink will be the latest in a series of efforts to grab a piece of this very large communications pie.
"What do you have now? Chat, posted messages, and email. We hope this will prove to be as popular as chat, if not more so. It's a fourth communication medium." explains Steve Glenn, president of PeopleLink, an idealab company. "This really shines when you want to have a quick interactive conversation with someone - it's far more time-critical than email."
PeopleLink, which will release its service to the world this Thursday, consists of a free downloadable client that allows you to send instantaneous messages back and forth with other PeopleLink users of your choice. In order for them to receive the messages, the people you've chosen have to select you, too. The interface and speed resemble a chat room - except that only one person is seeing your messages. The client will tell you instantly whether that person is online, and when messages come in your computer notifies you.
PeopleLink isn't the first to the playing field, however, and several virtually identical services - all free of charge and advertising-supported - have been sent into beta in the past two months. AOL, for example, began offering its popular instant message system, long available to AOL users (who send about 100 million instant messages daily), to the rest of the world on 22 May. Excite launched its PAL messaging service into beta on 12 May. And iChat has had its Pager beta available since 30 April.
"It's a bit of a hybrid. I wouldn't call it chat, I'd call it instant email," explains Dan Amdur, analyst at The Yankee Group. "Business usage is probably where the money is - in terms of consumer use, it's probably more of a "gimme" than something that people have to have."
Indeed, the common observation from all the companies offering instant messaging is that the services have been adopted most quickly by business users and intranets. Instead of walking around gathering up co-workers for meetings, or sending out emails that don't get read for hours, the messaging systems give instantaneous notifications to anyone at their desks.
"Usage patterns show that there's a huge amount of intranet applications for this stuff," explains Joe Kraus, co-founder of Excite. "Email is asynchronous - how often am I 150 messages behind during the day? Plus, there is no guarantee about how quickly I'm able to respond."
iChat, on the other hand, is targeting a more social group via the 3 million-plus users who currently hang out in its chat rooms, using the Pager service to enhance, personalize, and entice people into chat environments. Combining with their iChat software, the Pager service will notify users when their friends are hanging out in chat rooms or when activities are going on, as well as allowing private groups to flourish within larger chat rooms. Several hundred thousand people have already downloaded the client.
In order to succeed, the systems need to quickly gain critical mass; in order to do so, almost all the instant-messaging services include searchable directories of users, encouraging users to quickly look up and build databases of friends and acquaintances on the system. If you include a friend's email on your list who isn't already signed up with the system, the PAL and PeopleLink systems will send email to that person encouraging them to sign on.
Taken a step further, however, the concept of finding "friends" to page brings up serious privacy issues. iChat's Pager system, for example, allows you to search on any old name - say, Jennifer - and immediately view a list of people with that name, including their email, phone number, and address.
Competitors say this has led to harassment, although iChat CTO Andrew Busey says the company hasn't gotten complaints (and also states that future versions will warn about the public accessibility of personal information). PeopleLink, on the other hand, says it will protect privacy by refraining from offering a directory of users, and will not allow you to receive messages from a stranger that you yourself have not included in your list.
The natural extension of instant messaging, however, is what Kraus describes as "multi-partner PALing" - enabling more than one person to get in on a conversation and, essentially, turning the messaging center into a personalized chat room. iChat's Pager system already offers this capability, capitalizing on its well-established chat-software technology. Both PeopleLink and Excite also say this is in the works for future launches.
Meanwhile, eShare has already pushed the idea along further - creating a personalized chat room system that lives on your desktop. The Reunion software, which is being distributed to the 650,000 people who have homepages on GeoCities, will allow users to use their computer as private chat servers, linked by a main Midway Server, which will further include "buddy system" paging like the one included with eShare's chat client, Expressions. Like instant-messaging services, the only people who will be able to access your Web-based chat room are people you invite in; unlike most instant messaging, multiple people can converse at once.
"We're trying to take what's been the domain of the big service providers like AOL and give the power back to people," explains Ron Dunaisky, VP of sales at eShare, "allowing them to create their own environments without all the kooks."
Still, the Net population at large may find the burgeoning of new private communications technology a bit frustrating: Unlike email, there are no technology standards for instant messaging, preventing iChat users from paging Excite users, and vice versa. Unless all your friends are using the same client, you're going to have to register for multiple services. Glenn of PeopleLink is optimistic that standards talks are forthcoming, but others are dubious.
"I think that's a long way away," says Busey. "It's too technically difficult."
