martinlittle.com:thinkThin

As I said two days ago, my use and reliance on email has been decreasing. Matt and Matthew, two guys I've met via Mobitopia and talked with in #mobitopia, both had similar thoughts within 24 hours. Matt's illustration of IRC use is great, and really is an example of a typical day.

My further thought for today is exactly how much power Yahoo!, MSN & AOL hold -- power which is only going to increase as more people find email a pain. With email, people/names are associated with multiple addresses which include old addresses, spam-laden addresses etc. With instant messaging (IM), there are still 'spam' users on the system, but they can be blacklisted easily, leaving the user with a superbly clean list of contacts, and Yahoo! with a great insight into who you talk to when, and about what. Given that the IM protocols effectively remain closed, if, for example, Yahoo! suddenly decided to start charging for their service, exactly how much money would they make? $TACK$!

As always, there are open source alternatives, most notably Jabber, but the only people I know who use that would be described as technology aware, whereas most of my Yahoo! friends are the polar opposite, so it looks the power will stay with the big three for some time.