Ever since I wrote “Incredible importance of IM clients” I have been meaning to do a follow-up piece on how this technology which seems so simple on a day to day basis, is going to become even more vital to our interconnected lives. Well, Bill Burnham, beat me to the punch. Here is an excerpt from a must-read post.

In the beginning, IM communication was strictly a human-to-human affair. A few years ago companies starting sending alerts (and increasingly spam) via IM making it a computer-to-human affair. Now, with the advent of Data over Instant Messaging (DIM) technology, IM is rapidly set to become a computer-to-computer affair. Why send data over IM? One reason is that IM infrastructures have solved a lot of tough technical problems such as firewall traversal, multi-protocol transformation, and real-time presence management.

(Icon courtsey Bandar Raffa / Xicons)