For the sake of argument, assume that you have a cell phone and you're subscribed to Carrier A. You then wish to call, or send a message to, a friend who happens to be a subscriber of Carrier B. Naturally, you would expect your messages to get across, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to keep in touch and your provider would be severely restricting you to their network.

Well, this is not the case when it comes to Instant Messaging (IM) Services like MSN and Yahoo because they're not standard. In order to communicate with other people, all members must be part of the same network, and this means that if the network goes down (and it does more than anyone’s liking), everybody goes down with it!

Historically, IM has existed on closed and proprietary systems, with dedicated clients that can only connect to a single network. For many years users with accounts on multiple networks (say, AOL and MSN), would have to keep multiple programs open, which ate up system resources and cluttered desktops. By 2000 a handful of clients emerged that would allow users to manage multiple IM accounts from a single program. These stayed largely under the radar until 2002, when a client called Trillian hit 1 million downloads (and then jumped to 5 million six months later).

IM is also ripe for innovation, but developers have been hampered by a near-complete lack of cooperation from the major IM networks. Perhaps developers will take advantage of the growing number of networks that are open, adding new features that make them attractive to users still stuck on the old behemoths. Then Yahoo and Microsoft might be compelled to finally change - or perish.

The Event was all about Windows Live Wave 3: Darren Huston kicked off with Vision on Life without Walls (PC, Mobile and Online - Windows + Windows Live = full Windows experience), followed by Joost Nienhuis who spoke about the digital behavior of consumers which led to the Windows Live demonstration given by Arnout Hemel. Here we saw how the new Windows Live will make live easier for the various consumer groups, mainly the Social web users (stay in touch with friends easier and in a more personal way), and the Functional web users (how to organize my online life better).

- When will the (RC) apps (Windows Live Essentials) be released?
The answer to that is they will be released next week at http://download.live.com/

Previously these options were greyed-out, but today they're being activated and directs you to the appropriate websites associated with the Group (we'll talk about Groups more in-depth later). Unfortunately most of these links currently directs you to the 404 "We can't find that page" page you'd get when you visit any of the beta urls we've found previously ... with the exception of one – Groups Calendar!