Nimbuzz leads the way in Aggregated Social Networking / Chat

It's so simple it's almost genius! The RSS reader of the chat-based world. 10 years ago if you wanted to read an article on a website, you more than likely typed the URL into Internet Explorer and off you went. Today, my Google Reader handles hundreds of feeds from all types of internet sites, organises them and displays them in an easy to read, share and digestible way. So the chat world is following in its footsteps.

For someone who has previously boasted to not really 'do' internet chats, I have an account to do the very same thing with Skype, Google Talk, MSN (or whatever they are called now) and even Facebook has an offering! I use Skype the most although to a limited amount of people, and then Google Talk and occasionally Facebook. Not a heavy user but enough to keep on top of!

A while ago I became aware of a service called Beejive. It basically aggregates your chat logins into a single application, loads your contacts (I can't quite bring myself to say 'buddies') into a screen and you chat to them over the relevant networks, but from the same, single interface. Almost revolutionary! Although it did cost. Not being an excessive user I decided against it.

Now though I have found Nimbuzz and in the short space of time I've been using it, also seen ebuddy which is the same thing. Nimbuzz has one edge over Beejive: it's free on the iPhone! This morning it updated to include push notifications (although not for Skype yet, which is a shame).

This new approach and functionality helps me so I'm sure it will other people! It also seems to be a continuation of transparency being the new driver in innovation. Twitter I believe is the first hugely successful service to let almost anyone and everyone have access to their data. Their own website isn't the number one interface to twitter! Yet this has almost made it successful. The brand and the infrastructure are the value in twitter, how people get there is not. The same can be said for a lot of the chat programs. Skype make their money through calls (which you can do using Nimbuzz too). Therefore it does make sense to make the process of calling as accessible as possible. I haven't used all of Nimbuzz's offerings yet as I've concentrated on the iPhone app but I struggle to see where they make their money from? Maybe they take a cut of skype and other programs calls? I did notice that Skype seem to have a financial interest in Nimbuzz.

Whatever the intracies of the financial model of this new approach, I do believe as a strategy it is probably the right one to follow and will lead the way in the future: organisations opening themselves up to increase their exposure and therefore revenue whilst at the same time making their service more accessible for their users is a pretty good idea to me!