We are big fans of unified interfaces to modes of electronic communication. So we applaud companies like Trutap with this little ditty in TechCrunch last week. They recognize that with 67M IM users in North America and a whopping 82M in Europe, instant messaging is still a very important mode of communication. And there are so many different IM protocols: MSN, Yahoo!, AIM, ICQ, GTalk, Jabber, MySpace, LiveJournal IM, Bonjour, Groupwise, IRC, XMPP, Skype and probably a few I missed. Trutapp has created an interface that supports many of these protocols in one UI so you can access your network on each service without switching to a new client. They have a lot of competition including Mig33, Nimbuzz, eBuddy, Palringo, Adium, and others.

Here is my problem with this. IM is a commodity and no one is making money on it. From the user’s perspective, while it is nice to have one UI, this is just a small part of the problem. Frankly, what I really care about is that I want my IM conversations treated just like email and I want a dialog between you and me that started in email and at one point veered off into a quick chat via IM, to be storable and searchable in its entirety. Frankly, what I really want to be able to do is see all communication between you and me no matter what medium of e-communication we used at various times. From the standpoint of archiving, legal discovery and corporate liability, this is a big deal; its not just an issue of convenience to users.