Collaboration Loop
Wednesday, 20 April 2005
By Melanie Turek

Two trends are converging on the IM scene to make instant messaging an increasingly risky—and at the same time, increasingly useful—proposition: IT executives have more and more options for federation, and malware is growing in prevalence and sophistication almost daily. What's worse, the very fact of federation promises to increase the amount of malware running over those newly open networks. It's a Catch-22: We want to be able to message people without their having to participate in our companies' closed, proprietary networks. But we also don't want to turn IM into the next e-mail—a valuable communications tool that is slowly but surely falling prey to spammers, hackers, and other online criminals, causing some (though not me—more on that later) to question its usefulness.

On the same day this month, two news items hit the wires that show why instant messaging is getting both more and less useable. On the one hand, AOL announced the launch of its IM Federation Partner Program, which promises to make IM federation more of a reality for more enterprises. On the other hand, a variant of the W32/Kelvir worm shut down the Reuters IM network; it was just the most recent in a spate of IM threats including other worms and viruses, phishing scams and even SpIM (spam on IM—yeah, it has its own name).