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Don't be fooled by the saccharine emoticons and the pretty colors.
While the world of instant messaging may look breezy and mirthful, it's actually the site of one of the biggest pitched battles among today's Internet giants, and it gets more brutal by the day.
The story thus far:
America Online, which first conquered IM with its AOL Instant Messenger service (AIM), is being stormed by competitors on all sides, and some of these firms appear to be causing real damage.
Indeed, late last month, Microsoft announced that its MSN Messenger had actually surpassed AOL's chatter in number of active users. In a press release, Microsoft beamed that it now offers "the single most used instant messaging service in the world."
Like most conflicts, though, the IM Wars also have their conscientious objectors: They're a bunch of open source programmers working on an open messaging system called Jabber, and they say that the big firms' chest-beating is missing the real point. Messaging should be a part of network infrastructure, they say, as open as e-mail -- and it shouldn't matter how many users each service has.
Spend a little time talking to the various factions of the messaging war and you'll see that nothing here is really as it seems.
Take Microsoft's claim that it is now the world's largest IM service, for example. The company says that it got its data from traffic-monitoring firm MediaMetrix, which showed that MSN had 29.5 million users in 12 countries around the world. This slightly beat AOL, which had only 29.1 million users in the same countries.
But that's not the whole story. In its analysis, Microsoft only counted the AOL users who used IM through AOL's stand-alone Messenger, and it didn't include those who may have chatted while they were dialed-in through AOL's proprietary online services.
Sarah Lefko, a product manager of MSN, defended the count by saying that the company only wanted to compare free IM clients. "What we did was to compare apples to apples," she said. "We wanted to say that we are the largest free service."
But it's worth noting that AOL has a lot of paid subscribers, and when you count those, it's hard to declare MSN the "single most used" IM service in the world. Just in February, for instance, about 16.4 million AOL subscribers (just in the United States) used the IM service through AOL's proprietary network.
As if there wasn't enough confusion about these user numbers, there's also a puzzle about the other big issue in the IM world: "interoperability."
A couple years ago, when AOL was the undisputed IM king and companies such as Yahoo and MSN were just getting into the business, the upstarts decided that they wanted access to the millions of AOL chatters. They built IM clients that -- in a kind of hacked, Rube Goldbergian-fashion -- could allow MSN users to send messages to AOL users and vice versa.
But AOL balked at the notion that other companies' users would have access to AIM users without signing up to AIM -- and eventually, the upstarts desisted their patch into AIM.
Instead, they banded together and started a public-relations arm called IMUnified to push for an open messaging service in which customers of any one service can message any other members.
AOL refused to join this effort but it said it would work toward interoperability by itself. On Thursday, Kathy Mckiernan, an AOL spokeswoman, said that the company "supports interoperability with conviction," and that they would be testing an open service "by this summer."
Estella Mendoza, a spokeswoman for Excite@Home -- which is a member of IMUnified -- said the group would be testing an "interoperable standard" by the end of this year, and they'll eventually publish a specification to allow other companies to write interoperable IM clients.
But Andre Durand, the founder of Jabber.com -- a commercial company behind the open source movement -- says that many of the big firms' claims to open their services ring hollow.
"There are a lot of companies who abuse that word 'open'," Durand said. In his view, messaging shouldn't be viewed as a "service." Instead, "we should think of it as a dedicated, ubiquitous layer of network infrastructure, like smtp," he said, referring to the open system used to send e-mail all over the world.
Instead of messages between chatters being transferred through a single server -- whether it resides at AOL or MSN or even if it's an interoperable service between these companies -- Durand thinks that messages should be routed through thousands of chat servers residing all over the Internet, at corporations, universities and ISPs.
In this model, everyone would be able to chat with everyone else, regardless of where they were in the world, or what ISP they used or even what device they preferred.
When Durand describes this system, he's sounds somewhat messianic -- and it's a bit tempting to paint him as a naive youngster who doesn't quite know the size of the companies he's going against. But Jabber does have the backing of more than a thousand independent programmers, and as the wars between the big firms get ever more fierce, it's easy to see the logic of Durand's vision.
"This should be ubiquitous," he said, confidently. "I mean, pretend that the world had no smtp, and that every corporation had no e-mail. Pretend that everyone who wanted to send e-mail had to go through Hotmail. That's essentially the system we have now."
"So there is a demand for this to come in-house. Companies don't want their employees using a proprietary system to chat with each other. ISPs don't want their customers to go to AOL to chat. The game is not about who has more end-users. It's about who's providing the infrastructure. The other companies don't see this, and a year from now this will be a different place -- it will make sense."
