Humming Bird AIM

With instant messaging beginning to succumb to the same kind of problems that have plagued email for a while now (spamming, identity theft), the time is ripe for a fix – I give you Humming Bird AIM!

Picture the scene: you are sitting at your desk, bored and want to send a message to your good friend Ed in Finance. You type a message for Ed into the AIM client and press “Send”. Your message is printed out on a tiny printer next to your computer and picked up by your AIM hummingbird, Buzz.

Buzz is trained to recognise the names and respective locations of people on your Buddy list. He picks up the message and flits off to Ed’s desk at lightning speed, bringing you a reply just seconds later.

This new technology solves the problem of spam, since all messages are necessarily one-to one not broadcast.

It also provides authentication since Buzz is branded with your initials/coat of arms, so that recipients can be sure that messages have really come from you.

There are a few downsides – obviously the “A” in AIM now stands for “Almost”, since even the quickest humming birds are unlikely to outpace a fibre connection. Also, the scheme is only really suitable for use in large buildings or clusters thereof, at least until we breed mutant hummingbirds that can outpace jet fighters.

Still, I think the small stepback in terms of speed is more than compensated by the plus points - I see clouds of humming birds flitting around offices, zooming between buildings and imagine taking a tiny paper from the beak of a smiling humming bird in mid-hover, bring it on!