Having recently attended the Global Mobile Messaging Conference in Monte Carlo I had anticipated having quite a lot to report. However the best plans are sometimes laid to waste by the most unexpected of circumstances. Having a migraine while at the show didn’t help but the thing that made reporting the show truly difficult was the paucity of truly interesting stuff happening.

In fact, as a group I’d say the MM2.0 bloggers would issue a collective shrug to best describe what we though of the event. As far as I’m concerned the only notable trend was a decided focus on the part of all the carriers on Instant Messaging or IM. If you’re a web denizen you’re probably yawning about now. However, before you toddle off for a nap let me draw a few conclusions for you about why this is something to keep abreast of, what it means for the mobile ecosystem and why after all this time the carriers are suddenly excited by 1999 technology.

Let me start with the last part first. Actually, let me start by blaming the folks at Twitter. It’s all their fault. At least that’s how it seems to me because so far as I can tell that’s the only thing really different between least year and this that could account for the sea change in attitude that the major telecommunications companies have about truly contemporaneous messaging.

While I don’t think that the general public knows about Twitter sufficient to classify it as a social phenomenon, I’d say that the technology community is entranced enough by this particular application to call it a Techno-Social Phenomenon. The funny thing is that in its most basic form (which is how it is mostly used since the more complicated things that one can do with Twitter require injecting commands into the URL which is something beyond the average user) Twitter is nothing all that unique. In fact, an associate pointed out to me recently that AOL’s AIM instant messenger could have been Twitter nearly ten years ago but the developers added too much functionality. In fact, all that Twitter really is if you think about it is presence (I am online; or not) and status (I am washing dishes and hate it).

This exact same information lives in your AOL/AIM buddy list - it’s your status and the clever use of your away message. The only difference (aside from the field for chatting that AIM includes) is the fact that with Twitter you can participate in the public sharing of your presence and status formation whereas with AOL, the presentation of this information is reserved for people that are already on your buddy list or vice versa.

At present, Twitter, and lesser known but similar Jaiku are all the rage among those in the know - the early adopter crowd that always has the cooler phone, the Google Invite and the job with stock options. Okay, maybe those are just my coolier than thou “co-contwitterers” but you get the idea. Pause a moment for a pitying thought for poor AOL. Even when they get it right they can’t get it right.

Even today there’s what? Fifty-three million active users, and over 100 million or so registered AIM users? And like I said above, AIM is just Twitter with more easily accessible features. But are the cool kids playing in AIM? Sure we might have an AIM address - I use mine to register for sites that demand registration to get to the good stuff - but do I EVER check that mailbox? Ever is just Never minus an “N” as in Nope - I don’t.

I hope this irony doesn’t escape you. In about 1997 AOL already was providing a service recognizable by today’s standards as IM and yet due to their lack of cachet with the techie crowd an agile little start-up operating out of a funky loft in San Francisco might end up with a comparable market cap on a fraction of AOL/AIM’s user base in a time frame so short as to be almost unimaginable.

The thing is, AOL/AIM could still win. They probably won’t because they don’t seem to think tangentially but if any of their astute executives had been at the Global Messaging Congress they might have come to the realization that playing nice with the likes of Sprint, Vodafone, Telus, and Orange could be the key to a renewed period of growth.

The Telco’s suspect (and I think they’re probably at least partially right) that IM is going to move up the ladder of importance quite a lot this year. This is a good news, bad news situation for certain since IM will probably hurt SMS numbers maybe even substantially. Since SMS is a hugely profitable service for the Telco’s it probably worries them a good deal that companies like Twitter have figured out how to run their services over HTTP instead of SS7 resulting in nothing aside from some data charges for the use of the network, a far cry from the ten to fifty cents a message pulled in via SMS.

Oh well, just like voice, the party couldn’t last forever. I am sure that the carriers are sorting out new ways to extract their fifty pounds per man, woman and child next month and the one after that too, voice revenue or no, SMS revenue or no and IM revenue or no. In a worst case scenario the carriers can do to all of you what they seem to think they can do to me - have math errors in their favor adding up to tens of dollars in extra charges on each and every bill I get. Yeah, I audit them.

What? You don’t believe me? Check my Twitter - you’ll see.