seanmonstar

Cross Device Jabbering

People love to talk to each other. Especially when they’re friends. People do so every day across SMS, Facebook, and GTalk. It would be better for everyone if companies worked together to let everyone communicate with their friends in an easier fashion. It’d be easier than you might think.

GTalk comes as part of Google’s suite of apps by default on Android phones, so everyone who has one has an account. Plus, everyone who has a GMail account, is also signed up to use GTalk. Google+ Chat recently uses GTalk in the webapp, but the mobile version is some other service that can’t chat with people on a desktop computer.

iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads sold now come with iMessage, which intelligently blends SMS with a chat-like service. The way it manages to decide which service to use is the model that all these companies should use for what I describe below.

Even if your friends don’t have smartphones, many have a Facebook account, and use it all day long. Facebook released an app, Messenger, that does similar things as iMessage, where it tries to use its Chat service to talk to your friends before reverting to SMS.

GTalk and Facebook Chat already use the Jabber protocol (or XMPP) to communicate. There’s reasons to believe that iMessage could be close to supporting the Jabber protocol. iMessage and Facebook Messenger already intelligently pick which service to use. These 3 companies could work individually to allow their application to try to guess, based on contact information you already have of the user, if they can be reached through the Jabber protocol on one of the other services. This would cut down tremendously on the need for SMS, as well as alleviate the need for a user to have to remember the best way to contact one of their friends. The computers should figure this stuff out for us!

I understand the desire for lock-in¹, but at this point, each service is so big, it would be better to improve communication between them, and compete on other features. Each company needs to admit that they aren’t going to have all the users, and so it would actually make their service better if it included our friends on other services.

Universal Communicator

As the web moves towards more and more social, there are plenty of new channels to communicate with your friends¹. In some ways that’s awesome, but the silos it creates are less so. I’m finding it more and more frustrating to recall what service I should use to contact a certain individual. To contact my wife, I use GTalk, my brother, SMS, my in-laws, a phone call, a fellow MooTools developer, Twitter, and business-y people, with email. Yeck. Please, where’s my Universal Communicator?

I use Pidgin on my computers for all my chat needs. If you don’t know what it is, essentially, it lets me setup my AIM, Yahoo, Gtalk, IRC, etc accounts, combines all the friends list into one list, and I no longer have to care about which friend uses which service. If some of your friends use many, you can easily group them together to use whatever service they happen to be logged in to at the time.

I want Pidgin for everything. Chat, email, Twitter, SMS, video chatting, voice.

It would let me enter all the communication services I use, and then aggregate all the forms of messages into a consistent format that I can reply to, without having to know exactly which medium it’s using². If I want to voice chat with a friend, I don’t care if they’re using Skype, Gtalk, or their phone. I want to tell the app who I want to talk, and in what format, and let it figure out what medium to use.

Ideally, this would be available on PC/Mac, as well as iOS/Android. I don’t have the funds or availabilty to make this myself, but I sure would love anyone who did.