Tim Berners-Lee gave a keynote speech at 3GSM last year where he discussed the difference between what he calls a foundation technology and a ceiling technology:

A foundation technology is designed to enable innovation, to be the base which will support other even more powerful things to come. A ceiling technology is not. It is designed to provide a value, and for its provider to cash in and cash out.

He can talk, he developed the most important foundation technology of recent times: The web.

In contrast to the web, instant messaging was largely developed as a ceiling technology. The big players, Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo control more than 90% of the market and all of them rely on a closed technology. The result is that although lots of people use IM, the ecology of companies providing innovative solutions based on IM is tiny.

This is all about to change. XMPP, aka Jabber, is an open source instant messaging technology which had largely been exclusive to geeks until Google decided to base its GTalk client on the technology. Recently, it has been rumoured that AOL and even Microsoft will open up their networks to Jabber based clients.

ReadWriteWeb published an interesting article recently on how XMPP might be the future of cloud computing. Currently, the technology is being used by Tivo, Twitter, Mebo and many others and with the the possibility of other major players opening up their systems, 2008 might be the year when instant messaging evolves from being a ceiling technology to a foundation technology.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 at 3:35 pm and is filed under Business, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.