The Solution is Not Another Walled Garden

At their Worldwide Developers Conference, this year, apple dropped what to them must be the bomb the iPhone was.

Apple Blackberry Messenger for iPhones.

No, really, that's it.  Apple is building out a network like Blackberries have, but for iOS devices like iPhones and ipads.  Neat, eh?  Not so much.  It's mostly the same as:  but instead of pricey SMS (text messages, or Texts if you failed grammar) conversations which go through up to two phone carriers, span every cell phone made in the world within the last decade, almost, and are as ubiquitous as ICQ once wished to be, the Apple solution is more like the Blackberry one.  And with RIM's BBM working with iOS and Android, soon, it's not even as promising.

Their idea - stop me if you've heard this one before - links the 100 million uses who bought the 200 million iphones in the last 4 years, relays all communication freely through the apple network (subject to US snooping laws) and allows iPhones to talk with ... well, only iPhones, you're near a wifi hot-spot or have a paid data plan.  You may have seen this when it was called MSN or ICQ or AIM, now-quaint message platforms that were popular before the official standard came along and the smart people upgraded so they could talk to all their friends.

Don't get me wrong.  My work group at the sweatshop uses their blackberries for constant pings and chats throughout the day and after.  Gtalk via blackberry is very solid, and I use that for coordinating constantly.  The fact that RIM married a barely-useful keyboard with a free-ish comms network unilaterally rolled out and working by default on their devices - lock-in that Microsoft dreamed of for email - was one of the best things they could have done.  It allows modest communication and also prevents competitors from using the social network they've build.  It's like ICQ, but with hexadecimal numbers that look like 82bba019 instead of 934488.

But this is ridiculous.  iMessage - yeah, really - and BB Messaging both have zero privacy, but also are proprietary.  Instant messages using the official method have had really strong security and privacy for years.  E-mail works because it's standardized and open in its protocol:  any company can build an email app.  Standardized e-mail grew and ate the old, decrepit proprietary message apps for lunch.  This was done decades ago.  Standardization for messaging was laid down a decade ago.  Still, some company wants to lock you down, allow you to communicate with only some of your friends and harvest your membership to coerce more people to join their little society just because you're there.  We've done this already.  Hello, Apple, it's 2002 on the phone, all those now-cheesy messaging networks, and they all want their idea back.

It's not exactly like when the big Cable monopoly came in and bribed the clueless yokels with shiny pay-per-view beads so they'd sell off the Municipal infrastructure, because at least now we can run Gtalk on the blackberries and maybe one day apple phones too, one day, but it's still a walled garden like any other monopoly;  and I'm disappointed we haven't figured it out yet.