Copyright Ian Pearson, BT Futurologist

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The future of instant messaging

June 2001

E-mail has revolutionised communications between people, allowing them to deal with messages when it suits them rather than being interrupted at someone else’s agenda. In the same way, I let my computer answer all my calls and take messages when I’m away, and often when I’m in the office. I interrogate my mailbox when it suits me, rather than leaving my mobile switched on. A lot of people find this annoying, but I have a right to decide when I’m available. The phone is a tool, not my master. But most people still treat voice calls as urgent, dropping whatever they are doing to deal with them, even while they are with someone. For them, voice messaging is seen only as a last resort. Instant messaging also allows people to contact each other instantly. You can put a message on a friend’s screen immediately, rather than waiting for email delays. It’s not new – it was a standard tool on the VAX computer I was using in 1985, but it was never used much back then. Instant messaging seems to have caught on much more today, especially among AOL and chat room users. I suspect the culprits are the same people who account for the SMS explosion. The age profile of users probably hasn’t changed all that much, but most young computer users such as myself made little use of instant messaging in the 80s. What has happened is that normal people can now use computers. In the 80s, natural techies (i.e. geeks) accounted for the vast bulk of standard computer uses in the 80s. For these people, social considerations usually took a back seat to other things, such as the job in hand. Today, everyone uses computers and their use is therefore much more oriented to normal human needs, such as socialising. So instant messaging now finds a willing user group of people who want primarily to socialise. Some of us prefer to deal with things on our own timing, or have used email so long that an email behaviour pattern is buried deep in our brains. Others consider social needs more powerful and feel a need to be in touch. So much for amateur psychology. If socialising is the key to today’s users, we can anticipate much more development of socially oriented services.

Messaging has always been a source of problems because emotions don’t come across well in text. Emoticons have made a small improvement, but their limited success has meant that they were little more than a passing fad for most people. More sophisticated icons are another improvement, and we already see use of avatars for messaging to convey emotions by more realistic facial expressions. These technologies will see ongoing improvement. Instant messages and emails will soon be conveyed by avatars representing the sender’s emotional intention. This will converge with conferencing and virtual environment technology over the next few years. Then you will see and hear your friends and interact with them almost as if you shared the same room. Text instant messaging will probably evolve into a more natural voice interaction. The communications platforms of today will still exist underneath but most of the time we will use the higher quality human contact available at its higher levels.

Sensor technologies are also progressing. It is easy to test the stress level of a user by measuring skin resistively and temperature. Monitoring brain signals is also a doddle, though interpreting them is another matter, but progress will continue. Having interpreted them to some degree, this information can be transmitted easily along with messages, and could be used to control the avatar, or be translated into other forms of stimulation, such as vibration. In due course, we should be able to make a more direct link between our nervous systems to convey such emotions more directly. Kevin Warwick at Reading University has been planning to soon install such an emotional link between himself and his wife. If such trials are successful, we could see emotilinks becoming commonplace between friends. The strongest bonds however are reserved for couples, and it is hear that emotilinks will emerge, evolving eventually over decades into a direct link between two minds, linking them together as one.

Instant messaging today lets you know which of your friends are on-line. It doesn’t yet tell you where they are, but will do soon. If you’re trying to see who’s available for a trip down to the pub, it’s useful to know where your friends are and whether they are available. Position will become an important factor in messaging technology. Also, there are degrees of availability, but computers can cope with complex algorithms without difficulty. The computer may list you as conditionally on-line, deciding which people should be able to message you and under what circumstances. Automated social monitors will monitor and administer social groups so that they can communicate and socialise more effectively.

Such monitors could learn to be sensitive to the group as a whole, responding to group emotion, making suggestions and effectively acting as another group member. It could administer group diaries to organise parties or arrange babysitters. Services such as these will often require an instant response to capitalise on the emotion of a moment. Email would be too slow. Group instant messaging may make use of tribal fonts, styles, avatars, environments and logos. These identity tools could reinforce group cohesion. Positioning and navigation tools may couple with messaging in such a way that results in physical flocking behaviours emerging.

So messaging will evolve into a range of socialisation services, an area largely untapped by today’s telecomms companies, who cater almost exclusively to personal and business communications. But much as I like to think I can see much of what is coming down the road, I didn’t see the rise of SMS. Society has a way of taking things and using them in completely different ways than the engineers intended. I doubt that has changed and the best uses of instant messaging technology probably haven’t been thought of yet.