Email / IM

IM is obviously a growing part of computing and the internet. It will not go away. But, with all the different corporate owned systems of IM, what do you pick? Which will be victorious? The commercial/consumer IM systems will stay dead even, or just dead. Only a public format will win. And to do that, it has to be able to be used by everyone.

I propose the merger of IM and E-mail protocols. An IM system which works within traditional e-mail protocols such as pop3 and smtp. Specially adapted software could recognize certain field values as part of an IM conversation, but legacy e-mail reading would still read the messages.

And, email already can do file sends, which could travel over to voice-messages people love so much. The e-mails could also initiate connections between other programs, like ICQ's Game connection kinda-thingy.

The only problem is the speed of email, connecting to the mailbox all the time takes too much.. time. It would still work of course. But, seperate from this IM thing, we would need a new email protocol to allow both sending and recieving of emails. The client would keep a constant connection to the server for instant arrival of messages and instant sending, and each transfer would occure seperately, so as to allow large emails (with files perhaps) to download while several smaller emails download at the same time.