Dave Marvit and Vijay Saraswat
Members, Instant Messaging and Presence Protocol Working Group

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You may think instant messaging is only for gossipy teens. You'll change your mind when the office Coke machine sends you an IM to tell you it's out of Diet Dr Pepper. Sound crazy? To Dave Marvit and Vijay Saraswat, it's all part of the master plan to make instant messaging as important to human society as the telephone. Marvit and Saraswat are the guiding forces behind an outfit called the Instant Messaging and Presence Protocol Working Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force, a long way of saying that these are the guys who decide how instant messaging is going to work. Of course, instant messaging works now, sort of; but it's hopelessly balkanized. AOL's Instant Messenger doesn't work with Yahoo's, which doesn't work with MSN's and so on. By next year, Saraswat and Marvit hope to create industrywide standards that will fuse these disparate, feuding services into one almighty, global IM network connecting both people and machines.

It takes an excitable guy like Saraswat, an alumnus of the prestigious Xerox PARC research labs, to make you see the big picture. "It will be everywhere!" he exclaims. "On cell phones, on Palm Pilots, Pocket PCs, set-top boxes, television!" Marvit is equally animated. "Does the coffee machine have coffee in it?" he chimes in. "If it gets low, it'll message somebody. I want people to be able to track the space shuttles in orbit. Your next 'Buddy' will be the space shuttle!" That would be cool. But right now, we'll settle for the Coke machine.

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