I predict that in 2004 Google will announce a major move into instant messaging. As far as I know, Google isn’t overtly doing anything with IM right now. Paradoxically, that means that they are probably doing something with IM while people are looking the other way.

I have three reasons for making my prediction. First, IM is not on the blogosphere radar, nor does it seem to be on the regular media radar at this time. Look for the unexpected away from those that talk about the unexpected!

Next, Google hasn’t talked about IM. This is sort of the flip side to the first argument. Blogs and the media are sheep. The regurgitate what they are given, in most cases. Blogs a little less, other media a little more. Google isn’t talking about IM perhaps because they don’t want people to be thinking about it. (GMail came out of the sky; they weren’t talking about it.) GMail was a surprise attack, and I think Google’s IM will be a surprise attack.

The third reason for my prediciton is that in order for GooOS to be a reality, you need IM. Gotta have IM for GooOS. Perhaps they’ll do something with Jabber? As the Jabber site indicates, Jabber is Open, Standard, Proven, Decentralized, Secure, Extensible, and Flexible. Sounds like something the Google folks would love to use.

How about some names: IMoogle, GoogIM, GIM, or GMessenger. I’m sure you can think of some better names.

Side topic: Can anyone think of an effective way to chart how
often (dates) that Google announces new products and services? Official and unofficial (Google Labs) products and services would be interesting to look at for the purposes of creating a graph. Are they launching services faster and faster over time? What kinds of services? Can the services and products be categorized? What other questions can you generate?

(NOTE: Kottke folks, you might want to take a look at Google 2.0 where I talked about a Google browser back in 2001!)