Digital Media

The Internet offers everything from searching to shopping to social networking, but Net users still spend most of their time on plain old content sites, according to a survey from the Online Publishers Association.

In the latest installment from its monthly Internet Activity Index, the OPA reported that Internet users are now spending 42 percent of their time online using content sites, more than any other category. That figure represents a 24 percent jump from 2003 when Net users spent 34 percent of their time on content sites.

Content sites include those that offer news, information, and entertainment, such as NYTimes.com, ESPN.com, MapQuest.com, and Edmunds.com.

Analyzing five different categories--commerce, communications, community, content, and search--the OPA also found that people are gravitating to community sites, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, at the expense of communication sites or software that provide just e-mail or instant messaging.

How Internet users spend their time online.

(Credit: Online Publishers Association)

"In 2008, we introduced the Community category based on the emergence and popularity of sites like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn," Pam Horan, president of the OPA, said in a statement. "These new sites have had significant impact on the Communications category, which saw a 41 percent decline, due to the fact consumers are using Community sites where they can conduct these same activities more efficiently."

Among the other categories, people spend 5 percent of their time on search sites, up slightly from 3 percent in 2003, and 13 percent of their time at commerce sites, down from 16 percent five years ago.

The OPA also tracked how much time per month, on average, that people spend in a particular category. Net users will stay almost 7 hours at a content site, around 3 hours at a community site, and just under an hour at a search site.

How much time Net users spend online per month.

(Credit: Online Publishers Association)

Launched in 2003, the Internet Activity Index is conducted and compiled by Nielsen Online and posted online each month at the OPA Web site.

AOL has upgraded its AIM Express software, an online Flash-based application that replicates many of the features of the regular downloadable software (add your own review here).

Among the new AIM Express 7.0 features are tabbed conversations, status messages, text-message support to communicate with buddies' mobile phones, and compatibility with Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Mozilla's Firefox 2 and 3, and Apple's Safari 2 and 3.

The software is an example of the growing utility and sophistication of Web-based applications. Instant messaging, though, is somewhat more amenable to the task: it doesn't require the heavy processing burden of a spreadsheet, and not being able to work while offline isn't a big deal given that the whole point of IM is to chat with contacts on the network. Moving applications online poses some compatibility issues with various browsers or with software foundations such as Flash, but it can sidestep myriad other compatibility issues such as operating-system compatibility.

AOL also announced a new version of AIM for phones using the Windows Mobile operating system, including the Motorola Q, Samsung BlackJack, and some Palm Treo models. CNET Download.com editor Jessica Dolcourt reviewed the AIM for Windows Mobile phones beta in June.

For more than a decade, the Internet has suffered from multiple incompatible communication standards for instant messaging. Now it looks like Yahoo, one of the major IM players, is open to breaking the logjam.

I'm a power user of IM who struggles to find software that supports chatting with people on the four main IM networks: AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google. Today's situation, for me at least, is like having to own four e-mail programs for different networks or four telephones for incompatible phone systems.

So I was encouraged by words from Scott Dietzen, Yahoo's new head of communications products including Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo Mail. That promotion expanded his turf from his previous position at the helm of the Zimbra online e-mail software start-up that Yahoo acquired last year.

Zimbra, like Google and some other non-incumbent powers in the world of instant messaging, has used the open XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) standard for instant messaging. It's this standard that Dietzen apparently sees playing a broader role at Yahoo.

"I believe XMPP is the right platform through which to deliver interoperability with at least some of our partners," Dietzen said in an interview.

No doubt one of those partners would be Google. Generally, it's one of Yahoo's biggest rivals, but Google became a major partner in a search-ad deal with Yahoo announced in June. A sidelight to the deal was one line saying the companies would make their IM services interoperable. It's hard to say at this stage, though, how far Yahoo or others might go.

One-time deals or standards?
As I see it, there are two basic paths to IM interoperability. The first, which we've been on for some time, consists of one-off technology partnerships between various networks. For example, Microsoft and Yahoo's IM services now can link together, and the Google Web-based IM service built into Gmail works with AIM.

But that approach only truly works as long as all networks set up partnerships with all other networks--a combinatorics nightmare given the arrival of new IM services from companies such as MySpace, Facebook, and eBay's Skype. That's where the second approach--using a standard--comes in handy.

E-mail previously had assorted closed communities including America Online, CompuServe, Prodigy, and the Internet itself. The standard prevalent on the latter network, SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) won out in the long run. It's got shortcomings--for example identity authentication issues that contribute to the spam and security problems--but those problems arguably are easier to fix with one standard than many.

Standards move notoriously slowly, of course, especially when compared with the rest of the technology industry. But the Internet has reached a scale where IM incompatibilities have major consequences that retard innovation, too. Standards might hamper the development of new IM features, but I believe interoperability problems are denying us a broader, richer world of real-time online communication.

XMPP or SIP?
So if the IM powers want to move to IM standards, the next question is which standard to use.

Here, too, Dietzen has an opinion. When I asked him what's been holding back IM interoperability, he had this to offer: "There are two competing potential standards, XMPP and...SIP. If I were betting, I'd bet on XMPP emerging as the likely framework for adoption."

SIP, or Session Initiation Protocol, grew out of the world of telephony and is more oriented toward multimedia than straight text.

But XMPP looks to have an inside track among the incumbent IM powers. For one thing, Yahoo's Zimbra software framework supports it, Dietzen said.

For another, Yahoo opted to use XMPP in its Yahoo Live experimental video service, according to Process One, a Parisian company that sells XMPP-based IM server software using the open-source ejabberd software.

And there are signs others might be interested, too. Earlier this year, AOL began experimenting with an XMPP interface to its AIM and ICQ networks for instant messaging.

So perhaps there's an end in sight for this particular Tower of Babel. Adopting a standard means the IM networks will have to let go of some control, but if done right, it also could mean instant messaging could become a more popular, active, and useful part of the Internet.