Long post, so have a seat…..

As web portals expand and evolve into green-blooded monsters of their former selves, it is quite interesting to consider the future of IM with ever-shy, nonproprietary Jabber/XMPP having peeked its head into the big picture, which has long been dominated by MSN, Yahoo, and AIM (as well as ICQ, the first of them, which is now owned by AOL).

Having read that Google, the quintessential search engine that has been compared to and equated with God by the NYT’s Thomas Friedman and has launched to both controversy and acclaim alike its email service (thus bringing it into the portal business in an unbelievable tour-de-force that compelled the other big 3 to “up their game” a bit), has now launched the beta of its instant messaging service using the Jabber/XMPP network format, I’m beginning to think that the big 3 portals (MSN, AOL, and Yahoo) are about to be rendered at a loss of their loyal clientele.

I mean, look at the sheer number of web portals that we’ve left in the dust because of all those niceties offered by the evil big 3!

We’ve relied upon the instant messengers, profile directories, music services, mailing/newsgroups, and, most recently, blog services of the big 3 for God-knows-how-many-years. In the meantime, internet culture, in these regards, has stagnated considerably because of their obviously-arrogant, proprietary assertion of dominance over the web portal business, while the smaller, multi-service portals have been relegated to wallowing in the background.

With Google’s choice to extend itself from out of the search engine box, however, there is reason to believe that the other guys will now have a chance to assert themselves in similarly-myriad ways. The fact alone that Google Talk is using a combination of Jabber/XMPP and its own email service shows the Web world is about to become alot more tangible in the digital sense.

If Google pulls this venture (in progress as we speak) off as it hopes to, other, less-versatile web portals may be inspired to move from just one primary service (search, shopping, finance, sports, travel, government, ISP, etc.) into other services or focuses, such as email, personals, or even instant messaging and/or chat using Jabber/XMPP (being based upon email for verification and connection to specific servers).

With that said, I suggest a new application that will connect to any and/or all of the many Jabber/XMPP servers that are, or will be, in existence (as well as a search engine for them as well). It will need you to sign into the server using your email and password (both of which will be incumbent upon which email account you have, just like any other IM), and will also allow for chat. Plus, the protocol will be known as “jabber:”.

If such were to happen, then Jabber will become alot like IRC, and will also become, in a way, **instant messaging itself**, thus rendering AIM, Yahoo, and MSN’s IMs obsolete, as far as single, separate networks are concerned.