Most people work with some messenger on. But, unfortunately, the world of messaging is as the telecom world when it started, not all phones could talk to all phones. Some start ups have tried to improve this. Fring in the mobile world, Trillian in the fixed world among others.
In my case I use Adium for Mac and at any moment in time I have Adium and Skype so I can cover all my contacts. I find this annoying. With Fring I can have Skype, phone contacts and all the others messaging platforms in one app. But for some unknown reason Fring does not have a client for the Microsoft, Linux or Mac. With Fring it´s probably the first time that I find an app that is more sophisticated in a mobile than in a laptop.
And in any case Fring does not address two other issues that no messaging platform addresses. One is visualization. I think it´s time that the world of messaging moves from 2D visualization to 3D visualization a la Second Life. And the other one is communities. Now we have two kinds of contacts, in my case I have the contacts in Xing, Facebook, A Small World, Twitter plus the messaging contacts. Others join many other communities and have their own community contacts.
So maybe it is time to develop a new type of messaging platform, one that blends all messaging services with Web 2.0 communities and has visualization choices that are 2D or 3D.
Follow Martin Varsavsky on Twitter: twitter.com/martinvars
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steven on April 24, 2007 ·
Fring lacks “multi-user” support…
With my nokia I can be connected to several SIP services (fwd.net, gizmo, …) with fringr I can only insert 1 sip account;
Thesame for all other services…only 1 account…
No renaming of your msn contacts (and they tend to change aliasses every day)… it would be nice if we could just add their msn adress to our phonebook would it?
for pc you have eg Trillian, Pidgin, Miranda, …
none can handle skype unless you install it in the background though…
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Pietro on April 24, 2007 ·
I think Fring is great, but like you I’m wondering why they’re not developing a version for Mac/PC. Nimbuzz, an interesting competitor, is doing it.