Sharing experiences

The next big thing in instant messaging clients—which are getting more cluttered by the hour—is experience sharing. Things like ‘adult entertainment’, family images, and YouTube clips are shared trough the chatting environments. The new iChat is a good example. But will other clients manage to catch up?

Mac OS ‘Leopard’ will feature a new version of iChat; Apple's instant messaging client. The most significant new feature is the ability to show off photos, keynote presentations, and movies directly in a video conference with two or more participants.

The idea is clearly to enable the average user to share experiences without actually being there.

Catching up

Many [new] instant messaging clients like Yuuguu and Google Talk are catching up. However it is a long way from being as easy and fun to use as iChat.

Everyone are adding video capabilities and photo sharing. (Skype being the only party actively developing this for Linux.)

However no one have the same backbone—think Quick Look—as Apple does. I doubt anyone will be able to reproduce what Apple can do in their closed environment.

I do belive we will see more and more focus on experience sharing in other clients as well. Though Apple will lead in this area when Leopard is released this October.

Will competitors get their act togethe; or what do you think?

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One comment

Well, I'm not a big fan of video chat really, but I wish it had better support on GNU/linux that is for sure. But to tell you the truth; I'm more than happy with Pidgin, and the features that are missing isn't essential enough for me to switch to any other IM client in the near future …

Comment by Kent Vegard Evjen at 2007-08-15 @466.