Whenever Carl Sassenrath gets his hands on a new technology, many bet that it will turn out to be the next big thing.

If that’s true, then the next big thing is going to be instant messaging (IM). Sassenrath, revered as a tech pioneer by many and the founder of California-based REBOL Technologies, which develops Internet-enabled communication systems for business, says e-mail and the Web just aren’t sufficient.

"In a business environment, a lot of people are too busy to surf the Web" to find information they need quickly, says Sassenrath. E-mail, he points out, can be "cluttered," containing spam, personal notes and mailing list detritus. The trouble, Sassenrath says, is that a relatively small number of mechanisms exist for online communication.

Now, IM–which lies somewhere between e-mail and the telephone–is catching on as an effective new mode of business communication. Among other things, IM can be used for inter-office communication; it can be used like e-mail within a wide network of users, such as America Online; or it can be used as a customer service function on an e-commerce site, allowing visitors to get instant personal assistance without ever picking up the phone. And IM can only reach you when you’re online and want to be reached, an obvious advantage for anyone who wakes up to an in-box of 75 new messages, only two of which turn out to be worth reading.

"IM has entered into the lifestyle of knowledge work," says Dana Gardner, an analyst with the Aberdeen Group, a Boston-based technology market research and consulting firm. And it’s not, he says, something that’s being aggressively pushed on to businesses. In fact, quite the opposite is true. "It hasn’t been sanctioned by IT managers in many enterprises," he says, adding that programmers and developers are adopting it on their own.

One of the draws of IM, Gardner points out, is the ability to carry on many conversations simultaneously. This makes it easy, for example, to provide tech support to customers without having to wait while someone on the other end of a telephone line, say, reboots a machine or types in commands. At the same time, it’s got the immediacy that e-mail lacks. Users know who’s online, so they know not to waste time sending tech support queries to a technician who’s out to lunch. This, Gardner says, is one of IM’s most powerful features. "It isn’t just the fact that you can send these messages; it’s that presence detection is there."

Instant marketing

IM is looking increasingly attractive for targeted customer communication because it allows users to have more control over who contacts them. That way, the people being targeted are more likely to take notice of the messages that reach them. "You can have IM replace some of those e-mails that would go unnoticed," says Gardner.

Alex Diamandis, vice president of alliance marketing for New York City-based Odigo, a developer of Internet communication capabilities, touches on another reason IM is so effective for marketing: Users spend more time in a single day on IM than they do in an entire month on even the most popular Web portals. Diamandis estimates that users spend 80 minutes a day online with their instant messaging systems. Compare that to the average time spent on a popular site like Yahoo, he says, which only attracts the average user for about 60 minutes per month.

As for unsolicited ads, Gardner wonders about the extent to which marketers will be able to use IM. He’s not familiar with any examples of companies doing so right now and says it would defeat the purpose of marketing. Users would be even more likely to be annoyed by IM ads than by the e-mail kind, he says.

Even if the possibility of spam is taken out of the picture, IM has the potential to overwhelm people with information. Without vigilant filtering, users can get bogged down in a sea of messages. As Gardner puts it, they would become "paralyzed and bound up." If you’ve got seven instant messages on your desktop and everyone knows you’re logged in, how are you supposed to respond to them all quickly?

Security is another drawback of current IM technology, especially as it moves out of the realm of chatting 12-year-olds with usernames like "sparklegrrl998" and into the business world. Because the technology has tended to be from the consumer and retail side there’s often no way to authenticate users, Gardner says. Many companies avoid the technology for just that reason. Sassenrath says because of IM’s lack of security standards "a lot of firewalls and proxies will filter that stuff off," rendering it impossible for businesses to use IM with their existing networks.

Interoperability matters

It would be easier to agree on a system for secure IM if people could agree on a standard IM service. The merger of AOL and Time Warner has brought into the spotlight concern about the current lack of interoperability between AOL’s product and others. Odigo’s Messenger is one of AOL’s rivals, and Diamandis complains that, with AOL’s lack of IM interoperability, "It’s hard for innovators to foster new ideas and new things." He describes AOL’s IM system as residing in a "walled garden."

AOL says publicly that it’s working on interoperability, though the company did not respond to interview requests for this article. Steve Case, AOL’s CEO, said last summer in prepared remarks for a Federal Communications Commission hearing on AOL and Time Warner’s merger that "the challenge we all face now is to create server-to-server interoperability that allows users of all these different services to talk to each other seamlessly. To that end, AOL has taken several steps forward."

Of course, not all of AOL’s competitors agree that the company has taken steps toward IM interoperability. Odigo claims that it has come up with 17 different IM systems that could communicate with AOL’s, and each time it presented a new system to AOL, the online giant changed its system so that Odigo’s was no longer compatible.

But no matter how the interoperability debate gets resolved–if it ever does–instant messaging looks poised to become an increasingly effective way for businesses to communicate with customers. Does this mean it will overtake e-mail any time soon? The consensus is that the two are complementary, although Diamandis predicts that it probably won’t overtake e-mail in terms of total messages sent.

Of course, the volume of messages that get sent may not be a reliable indicator of the effectiveness of a communication technology. More raw bytes may even imply less effectiveness. Compare your e-mail in-box now to that of a few years ago, when it was probably cluttered with more "humorous" forwards and bogus virus alerts than personal or business communications. Instant messaging, unlike e-mail, will only accept messages when you are online, thereby avoiding the constant stream of junk mail that can languish in an in-box while you’re offline. And Gardner, for one, stresses this kind of control as the way that IM can avoid becoming just one more way to talk: "You’re not just adding more channels of communication, but you’re adding intelligent management." P

Julia Lipman is a computer programmer, and she writes an Internet column for DigitalMASS.com. She lives in Cambridge, Mass.