Rocky Mountain News IMing - the 21st century telephone

"Instant messaging (or IMing for short) is becoming to the dawn of the 21st century what the telephone was to the beginning of the 20th - a normal way of communicating in real time across previously uncrossable distances, making faster, if not better, typists of us all.

How different it is, and how little we realize it. Could human beings really have once existed in a world where we had to communicate by paper, where ink-smeared messages took weeks, even months to cross oceans and inform recipients that someone far away loved them? Today, that old absence that once made the heart grow fonder is assuaged by the new-message notification. Souls that once ached across impassable divides wondering and waiting can now connect in seconds - via satellite."

redux [12.07.01]
CIO.Com Patterns of Progress

"Despite all the fanfare about interactive applications and e-commerce, the killer app for the Internet is the same today as it was two decades ago—person-to-person communication. Although Web traffic is 20 times the volume of e-mail traffic, it is e-mail that delivers the highest value to consumers and businesses. And in the wireless data business, short-messaging service—used to send messages of up to 160 characters to mobile phone customers—is the unheralded killer app, not the fancy mobile commerce, news and entertainment applications that service providers love to talk about. The lesson is that value hides in the strangest of places, and killer apps sneak up on you from directions you least expect."

redux [10.16.01]
The Economist Looking for the pot of gold

"What can operators do to boost traffic and maximise transport revenues?

The answer seems obvious: person-to-person communication. The success of text messaging relative to WAP shows that people like to use their phones to communicate with each other, rather than to download information from content providers. In the words of Andrew Odlyzko, a former AT&T researcher who is now at the University of Minnesota, "Content is not king - connectivity is more important." Indeed, he argues that the killer app for 3G phones might turn out to be increased voice traffic."

redux [03.19.01]
Slashdot Clay Shirky Explains Internet Evolution

"Email is the gateway drug of the internet, because once email is in place, people begin to expect full interoperability."

"In fact, in a news flash that seems to have caught the entire telecommunications industry by surprise, people who buy mobile phones often like to communicate with one another. Had this not been such an absolutely unpredictable occurrence, maybe somebody at the WAP consortium could have predicted that when you add text to the phone, users might like to communicate with one another via text.

Access to email is the #1 feature customers want in a wireless text device (duh), and all those wireless auctions where the telcos spent 22 gajillion Zlotys to own the customer now look like a giant shell game, because the users don't want to get headline news. They want to talk to one another, and they will switch carriers until they are allowed to. Email is the thin end of the interoperability wedge, and this will be true of interactive TV as well."

redux [06.21.01]
Newsbytes 'Instant-Messaging Generation' Emerges

"The Internet is used by almost three-quarters of U.S. teen-agers, a new report says. And nearly all of them are using instant-messaging technology in ways that may be transforming the manner in which kids deal with one another.

"It's kind of like having lots of telephones," said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which conducted surveys late last year that were used in the 46-page report. "Because it's synchronous conversation, it's the quick-hit kind of stuff that a phone conversation would have, except you're having it in many cases with many, many people.""

redux [05.09.01]
Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies Conversational Technologies

"Conversations are an important part of our daily lives. For most people, in fact, they are the most important way to acquire and spread knowledge during a normal working day."

"Conversations provide a comfortable medium in which knowledge flows in both directions, and where contributors share an inherent context through their subjects and relationships. In addition to old forms of conversations--direct interaction and communication over the phone and in person--conversations are becoming an increasingly important part of the networked world. Witness the popularity of email, chat, and instant messaging, which enable users to increase the range and scope of their conversations to reach those that they may not have before."

"Still, little attention has been paid in recent years to the popular Internet channels that most naturally support conversations."

redux [02.18.01]
First Monday Content is Not King

"The Internet is widely regarded as primarily a content delivery system. Yet historically, connectivity has mattered much more than content. Even on the Internet, content is not as important as is often claimed, since it is e-mail that is still the true "killer app."

The primacy of connectivity over content explains phenomena that have baffled wireless industry observers, such as the enthusiastic embrace of SMS (Short Message System) and the tepid reception of WAP (Wireless Application Protocol). Combined with statistics showing low cell phone usage, this also suggests that the 3G systems that are about to be introduced will serve primarily to stimulate more voice usage, not to provide Internet access.

For the wired Internet, the secondary role of content will likely mean that the dangers of balkanization are smaller than is often feared. Further, symmetrical links to the house are likely to be in greater demand than is usually realized. The huge sums being invested by carriers in content are misdirected."

redux [02.04.00]
The Guardian Online Why content isn't king

"Imagine the discussions that must have gone on around the invention of the telephone: a new medium for delivering content directly to households. Indeed, that was exactly how some people did use it. In Budapest you could pick up the telephone and listen to music and news until the first world war... It didn't turn out that way because people preferred listening to each other: they preferred "self-generated" content."

"Companies with a strategy that facilitates communication between people, a strategy that facilitates self-generated content, will prosper as the world becomes more interactive and broadcast becomes just one sector of a much richer media world."