The stuff about RCS has been making me think about the whole concept of Instant Messaging. While I'm not totally up on what's going on in the IM world, there do seem to be some issues with it (IMHO). Currenly, the most popular services all revolve around everyone connecting into a central system (AOL, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ). So if one of those companies happens to go poof, or decide not to do it anymore, everyone using it is screwed. So far everyone's giving away their client and access for free, so I'm not quite sure how they are making money to keep themselves running. One of these days one of them will disappear and leave a bunch of people adrift.
A few years back a friend of mine had a company called Activerse, who had a cool IM product called Ding! With Ding! companies and ISPs would have their own local Ding! switchboard, that could host users. So instead of just having a screen name you had an IM address, like having an email address (it was actually in a url format). This way you could have a number of switchboards out there, and if one happened to go down it would only effect the people who connected to that one. Of the different IM systems I've seen out there currently, Jabber is the only one that seems to work this way. (Note to self, look into Jabber more).
There's been talk about a standard for Instant Messaging, but part of me kind of doubts it will ever really happen. Everyone seems to want to make a profit off of it, which means finding a common ground is that much harder.
