Fun(?) with Mobile Instant Messaging
A couple of weeks ago I was fortunate enough to be able to trade my clunky BlackBerry 7520 for a shiny new silver Verizon 8830. It was reminiscent of the time I swapped my old P3 Dell laptop for a brand new PowerBook G4 a few years ago. I felt like I had jumped ahead about a dozen years on the technology curve.
So last weekend I searched the Crackberry forums for mobile IM clients. The most popular one out there is Ramble, but it only supports AIM. But the crown jewel of BB IM apps seems to be JiveTalk. I installed it and fired it up, configured it with all my accounts, and logged in. So what happened? I got a series of messages on my laptop telling me that I was now signed on in more than one place so I was being disconnected.
Why is it that at this point in time public IM services don't allow you to sign on at more than one location at the same time? How do IM services expect to support an increasingly mobile user population without this capability?
ah ha. Well MPOP (Multiple Points of Presence) works well with open standards protocol services like XMPP found in GoogleTalk. Yes, if you are an EIM customer and have something like MSFT Office Communications Server, MPOP works in this scenario too. However, as Irwin is talking about Public IM, i could not resist citing that once again this is an area where XMPP open standards clearly are of benefit.
Posted by: Anthony West | Sep 09, 2007 at 19:13