At the CTC conference yesterday I ran into Stowe Boyd, who, like me, is on the advisory board for the conference and running a few panels here. We had a short conversation about Yahoo Messenger, WebEx/AOL's upcoming release of their IM, the Mac, and what all this means. Stowe originally coined the term IM 2.0 a few weeks ago when he introduced this term after the Yahoo announcement of a plugin architecture for Yahoo Messenger.

Stowe's point about IM 2.0 is that the public instant messaging networks -- all of which are moving, at long, long last -- to serving as presence and messaging infrastructure, can now serve as the basis upon which an ecosystem of instant messaging enabled social tools can be constructed.

Although Stowe and I have known each other for years, we don't always see eye-to-eye on things (see Continuous Partial Attention, or Attention Management topics that we have debated on). IM 2.0 is another thing we may not aboslutley agree on.

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Yahoo IM 2.0

Dustin Hoffman, in the Graduate, was advised by a gentleman in the know to go into "plastics." That was the 70's, today it is "plugins." And that is exactly what is new in Yahoo Messenger. Some of these new plugins allow features such as "co-browsing" such as having a group look at restaurant reviews to help decide where to eat. They have even linked to the Amazon "wishlist." Other options include adding location-based information to the buddy list, or a plugin that lets you know how many unread blogs your buddies have posted recently.

One of the companies that participated in this announcement is a start-up called JetEye, which has an interesting way of browsing the web, allowing you to clip objects (audio, video, text, picutes, etc.) from a web page and store them in a JetPak (essentially an intelligent folder) where you can organize and layout these items and if you wish share the JetPak with others.

WebEx Enterprise IM 1.0

Not to be left behind, Webex will also be releasing a beta of their new IM client (in partnership with AOL). CS had a recent briefing with WebEx and was quite impressed with this new software. It is not IM 2.0, WebEx is too new at this for that. But it does offer a lot of IM functionality, the ability to have presence in all of the Office applications, and like all WebEx offerings, is a service.

Although pricing has not been established for this version (it will be released in Q4) we suspect it will cost about $1-2/user/month. The big difference between Yahoo IM and WebEx IM is that WebEx is focused on the enterprise while Yahoo is focused on the consumer.

First, Second and Third Order Effects

A first order effect is just to enhance or extend what you were doing. A second order effect is to do something new, in this case based on a new technology, and a thrid order effect comes out of the use of the technology of the second order, but in a new shape and form. If your confused, maybe this example will help: when cars were introduced in the late 1800's their first order effect was to be able to transport people further, faster then horses or horse-drawn carriages. A second order effect of cars was the U.S. freeway system and a third order effect was shopping malls.

So let's look at collaborative technologies, and specifically IM in light of these 1-2-3 effects. The first order effects of IM were chat or text messaging. It worked better then the phone in that it gave you an indicator of "presence" and allowed you to interact with people through a different communication channel. Stowe's comment (and also Robin Goods) about the Buddy list being the core of IM, goes to this ability to show presence and status. I called this article IM 2.0 because I think that we are now in the second order effect of IM, that is the ability to build social, web-based applications on top of the core IM funcitons such as presence and status. Stowe is absolutley right in this respect, and I believe he correctly identified this trend.

Third order effects are often harder to see. After all who would have predicted shopping malls after seeing their first car putt down a dirt road? IM 3.0 will embed more of the idea of identity. Not only will it allow you to co-browse with your buddies, but you screen name or role will actually be part of your identity matrix.

The Role's the Thing

At some point, developers will realize that people are people, and that they may play different roles at different times. When you are in your corporate role certain filters for content may apply, you may have access to different documents and data, etc. You might have a different screen or IM name in your corporate role then you do in your private role.

To take this example a bit further, you might even have different roles at your job, being a project manager on one project, a worker on another and an observer (for oversight or compliance) on a third. All of these different roles may also be tied to IM, and allow you to see different people (i.e. team members) their status (busy, on the phone, out to lunch) and additional information about them (where they are physically located at this time, what they are paying attention to as they browse the web, who they interact with online, etc.

The software has to be smart enough to know what role you're in and when, and then provide you with the functions, content and interactions you need for that role (or context). Whether it is working with buddies to figure out where you want to go camping for the weekend or resolving a critical issue on a project, IM 3.0 applications make the IM more about you (who you are, what your actions and communications are) then any of the previous incarnations of IM.

Weather these features arrive as plug-ins or collaborative mashups we will just have to wait and see. My guess is both.I have written about Mashups a lot over the past few months, and Yahoo just had another "Hack day" last Thursday (they seem to have these about every 6 months). With hundreds of new ideas emerging from these sessions, many of these ideas are good enough to get funded and later become features or new applications, and some of them will likley find their way into Yahoo Messenger, and may eventually evolve into an IM 3.0 application.

For example if some of these presence, location and affilitaion pieces from IM were added to Yahoo Personals, you could start to "know" more about potential people you looking to match up with for a date. It could let you know if they are in the same zip code as you. It could let you know what they like to eat (by the restaurants they browsed), it could let you know what others think of them. It would in essence allow you to understand the "context" of that person much better then just seeing a few facts about them in a static profile. IM 3.0 is dynamic, people are dynamic, so why should not the information about them change as they do?

Corey Doctorow, in his science fiction book "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom talks about a society of the future where people are not only immortal (their consiousness can be downloaded into a new clone of themselves) but the society has determined a more direct measure of value (then money) called "Whuffie." According to Wikipedia: Whuffie is the ephemeral, reputation-based currency of Cory Doctorow's sci-fi novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. This future history book describes a post-scarcity economy: All the necessities (and most of the luxuries) of life are free for the taking. A person's current Whuffie is instantly viewable to anyone, as everybody has a brain-implant giving them an interface with the Net.

All Corey has done here is to extend IM into the 3.0 arena where your value is now tied to your identity and is instantly available to others online. Will our society be Whuffie based in a hundred years? Who's to say, after all, it was hard to see shopping malls springing up when you just saw your first car!

tags: robin+good,ctc2006, instant+messaging, yahoo+messenger, MSN, AIM, the+buddylist+is+the+center+of+the+universe,collaboration, webex, yahoo messenger, the+buddylist+is+the+center+of+the+universe+2.0, mashups, instant+messaging+2.0, ikimbo, ctc2006, ed+simnett, instant+messaging+planet, jeteye, IM 3.0,