> Clients

IM Clients
Instant messaging is perhaps the dominant means of real-time communication on
the Internet today. IM’s roots can be traced back to the Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
networks, which introduced the chat room concept but did not track online presence
and never reached the popularity of IM. Just as IM is the next logical step from
IRC, voice chat is the next leap from text-based chat. Most of today’s most popular
IM clients have included voice functionality, including AOL’s Instant Messenger,
Yahoo! Messenger, and MSN Messenger. Skype took the opposite approach and created
a chat client that focuses on voice as the star and text chat as an afterthought.
Even Google jumped aboard the IM bandwagon, releasing Google Talk. Let’s take a
look at these clients to see what makes them similar, and what makes them different.
AIM,AOL’s IM service, surely wasn’t the first on the scene, but it has the largest
base of users. Initially AIM was limited to users of the AOL Internet service, but
eventually it was opened up to the Internet as a whole.With the addition of a proprietary
voice capability in late 1999,AOL was a VoIP pioneer of sorts. (although
voice chat was first available through Mirablis’s ICQ).Yahoo! Chat jumped aboard
the voice bandwagon soon after, and Google’s more recent client has included voice
from the beginning. In 2005,Yahoo announced interoperability with Google and
MSN (who also has a voice chat plug-in for messenger that is also used with its Live
Communication Server product). In addition, Microsoft’s popular Outlook e-mail
client (and entire Office suite in the case of LCS) can be linked to Microsoft
Messenger. Also worth mentioning is the Lotus Domino IM client that competes
with Microsoft LCS in the enterprise instant messaging (and presence) space, as well
as Jabber, which can be used to tie together both public and private IM services
using the XMPP protocol.
Google Talk is the newest comer to the IM game.Though Google Talk is still in
its infancy, it stands to succeed due largely to a philosophical stand point, embracing
open standards over proprietary voice chat. Google Talk aims to connect many different
voice networks over a series of peering arrangements, allowing users to minimize
their need to run several IM clients. Like Skype, Google seeks to bridge
traditional phone calls with Internet telephony, promising to federate with SIP networks
that provide access to an ordinary telephone dial tone. Google recently
released a library called libjingle to programmers, allowing them to hack new functionality
into Google Talk. It will be interesting to see where Google takes Google
Talk in the future.


Video Clients
Most of us can probably think back and recall seeing episodes of The Jetsons when
we were younger. Or pictures of the AT&T PicturePhone from the 1964 World’s
Fair. Movies have all but promised these devices to be a staple of every day life in
the future. And for decades, the video conference has been pushed by enterprises
seeking to save money on travel (though investments in video conferencing equipment
tend to sit around gathering dust). Live video on the Internet has its adherents,
and today we see yet another wave of marketing aimed at the business use of video.
So, will video finally take off around VoIP just like audio, or is there something different
going on here?
The video phone has been tomorrow’s next big technology for 50 years but the
issue has been more sociological than technological. Certainly, popular instant messaging
clients have included video chat capabilities for some time now, although
each client typically supports only video between other users of the same client or
messaging network. And although it always gives me a kick to see someone else
announcing that they’ve solved the gap with technology, the point is well taken that
video is here to stay in VoIP systems—even if it doesn’t get as much use as VoIP.
The latest on the video bandwagon is the Skype 2.0 release. At only 15 frames
per second and 40 to 75 kbps upload and download, Skype Video works well on a
standard home DSL line or better. Other popular IM clients with video include
Microsoft’s Messenger and Yahoo Instant Messenger.AIM now offers video as well.
H.323-based IP videoconferencing systems have been available in hardware and
software from many sources for almost a decade at this point, so there’s no shortage
of vendors in this space. And SIP video phones are available from many of these
same vendors and from startup companies in the SIP space.



Wireless VoIP Clients
Over the past few years, an explosion of wireless VoIP solutions has hit the marketplace.
Most of these solutions are immature and if broadly deployed can completely
overrun the available bandwidth on 802.11b (or g) networks that were not engineered
for high-density voice, even with QoS prioritization.And although 802.11a networks
can handle higher wireless VoIP densities, they present other backward-compatibility
issues of their own.And we haven’t even gotten to the security issues yet! Still, the
promise of WiFi VoIP is tantalizing, and most enterprises that have deployed VoIP
solutions seem to have experimented with it.The idea of a combined cellphone/WiFi
phone (and maybe PDA too) seems just too compelling to ignore, even if power consumption
issues sideline keep the concept sidelined in the short term.