Zoho invites more cloud app users by embracing more IM protocols

For a number of reasons, some of them indeterminate, despite all the evolutionary pressure to move it to the next level of its evolution, instant messaging hasn't evolved as an application. One reason I've always suspected is that it's difficult for developers to find the impetus to devote the amount of effort required to evoke revolutionary change, on a platform that's offered to most customers for free. The counter-argument to that is that SMS isn't free, and yet it's stuck even further in the Stone Age.

If IM does resemble one ongoing revolution in application architecture, it's "the cloud" -- the nebulous, always-on service built to respond to user requests from wherever. Whereas at the beginning of the decade, services like AOL, Yahoo, and MSN used their respective IM platforms as weapons against one another, today's strategies -- which now includes Google -- have them opening up those platforms for generally unencumbered use by others. That hasn't exactly made Trillian for Windows and other multi-protocol IM clients the most perfect of applications just yet, but week after week, those of us who work in widely-dispersed offices do manage to get by somehow.

Zoho's approach to connectivity has been to provide its users with cloud-based, general-purpose applications such as Zoho Notebook and Zoho Writer (which has improved markedly over last month), the platform and tools to build more specialized applications, and a chat facility that gives those users basic IM. Last Wednesday, Zoho improved on that score as well, with a Zoho Chat version 2.0 update that enables connectivity through, along with the company's own platform, all the major "open" IM platforms as well: AIM, Yahoo, Google Talk, MSN, ICQ, and Jabber.

"We have other good features from our previous versions intact," blogged Zoho's Raju Vegesna last Wednesday, "like the History section that lets you review/search all chat transcripts with all users and the Embed options that let you embed your chat boxes on your Web site/blog."

But folks who have been begging, pleading, stomping, cursing, shouting unto the heavens for a substitute for a veritable cavalcade of mediocre functionality in the multi-IM department -- especially for Windows -- will find themselves not entirely satisfied with Zoho Chat 2.0. While it leverages multiple IM platforms, it's evident right off the bat that it's meant for connecting Zoho users to other Zoho users. Users' pictures, for example, are taken only from their Zoho profiles, at least for now. And Zoho Chat 2.0's interoperability with AIM isn't exactly friendly; last week in Betanews tests, though it connected on the Yahoo Messenger network fairly well, it wouldn't connect over AIM at all. Today, however, we had our first luck on that platform.

Because Zoho Chat consumes a Web page, there's this big open space in the middle which really doesn't have a logical purpose. You can tear off chat sessions and drop them there like in an old Windows application workspace, but otherwise, it's a lot of wasted space just for saying, "Good Morning" to its own user.

Clearly, Zoho's developers have been thoughtful in some departments. While we couldn't get sound events to work on any Web browser we tried, we expected problems such as this because we've seen them before with other online apps. However, Zoho Chat's alternate approach to getting your attention when someone sends you a message or buzzes you is actually quite clever: It rotates the user's message in the title bar of the open tab, like a scrolling marquee.

As we've noted before with AIM Express, having an instant messaging app open in a Web page stops being convenient when you have to use the browser for some other purpose. We've found our own clever work-around for that problem: While we use Firefox 3.0.8 for everyday purposes, we have Google Chrome open in the background, running Zoho Chat. You can reverse the roles, of course, but Chrome's tab arrangement is actually more fitting for having a smaller app open in the corner of the screen.

The real purpose of Zoho Chat, most assuredly, is to get more people involved in the Zoho user community; and it's there where the company has already unveiled such functionality as online meetings and desktop sharing. Those are features which most multi-IM protocol systems don't have, and aren't even close to having. Granted, those extra features take place on Zoho's exclusive platform and are open only to Zoho users; but competitors' single-protocol applications with similar live meeting features, such as WebEx's AIM Pro, deploy those extra features on their own platforms as well.

So we're not kicking Zoho Chat 2.0 out of the park just yet -- it's close to "prime time," if not 100% ready. If whoever improved Zoho Writer is working on Chat as well, we have high hopes.