Festoon Plugs Skype Into Google Talk

Needless to say, I find this to be an interesting trend - the interconnection of IM services. I, for one, have four different IM accounts and as a result have four different IM clients on my desktop. What a pain.


I blogged earlier this week about Meebo, a creative way to use Web 2.0 design to have all of your IM clients merged within a single web page. On some level, I have to wonder if the interconnectivity of IM clients has a negative impact on the market potential for a web site such as Meebo. At first, I believed that Meebo’s power was in the interconnction, but now I have to imagine that its differentiation will be from its client-less approach.

The other curious issue is the value of the installed user base. With all of the IM’s being discreet communities (as it is today), there is a high switching cost for users as you need to get all of your existing friends to switch with you, so the value of that network was very high. With innerconnectivity, you can pick your favorite IM client and not have to worry about losing all of your contacts, potentially decreasing the value of these networks.


Of course, it will be quite some time before all of the functionality of each IM client is available across the board. When that finally happens, it will be interesting to see how each IM service tries to attract new customers through incentive programs and other marketing tools. My opinion is that this phenomenon will make the IM market look much like the cell phone market today, or the long distance market a few years ago.