I still find it surprising that the “classical” messaging network operators don’t support the native (“Wireless Village”) mobile clients shipped with almost every phone nowadays, and they rather prefer to write their own proprietary clients. Besides the development and distribution costs associated, being locked to a proprietary network limits the user’s freedom. In contrast, the native clients are based on a standard specification optimized for mobile networks and mobile phones:
- Standards based means freedom for the user. You can chose between service providers, like Yamigo.
- Optimized for mobile networks means supporting maintaining a session across multiple connections, perhaps even with different IPs. Imagine entering a tunnel, loosing your connection and being able to reestablish the connection and your conversations seamlessly.
- Optimized for mobile phones means things like not draining your batteries by using operator infrastructure like WAP Push or even UDP datagrams.
When thinking Wireless Village, I am really looking at Yamigo, the largest free mobile chat service. Yamigo started in Finland in 2003, developed an OMA IMPS CSP server, formerly known as Wireless Village, and provided a gateway to the mainstream instant messaging networks: Yahoo! messenger, AIM, MSN, and ICQ. Yamigo grew to reach its first 100,000 users in 2006. Since then, there has been little to no development. Even without development and support, Yamigo currently has grown to over 135,000 users.
I strongly think the world needs a service like Yamigo. Personally, I believe we’ll look back at 2008 as the year when mobile IM finally kicked off. Unlike in the past, most operators are now open, and phones ship with better native WV IM clients installed. While some operators still remove the default IM client shipped by the manufacturer, this is becoming less of a norm. In other words, Wireless Village is silently ubiquitous, at least now that Yamigo has been dead for over a year.
It’s to time to wake up! And so I have started the onesoup service, in order to bring a WV service back live. I want the service to be useful and really simple, even if that means only partially supporting the specs. For example, at least initially, onesoup will just be a gateway to the existing networks, and there won’t be any “onesoup network”, meaning no groups, no search, etc.
My goal is to make the experience of using instant messaging on your mobile phone as easy and streamlined as possible. Onesoup will provide automatic registration, and you will be able to access your instant messaging network seamlessly without requiring downloads or complex setups.
I am just starting coding and setting up this blog as I walk through the implementation. I’ll be setting up a mailing list for folks that might be interested in this service, e.g. as private beta testers (since we’ll need to test with a lot of phones!).
Comments or suggestions are highly welcome.
