Poul and all,

This is my view:

T.140 -------- T.140 is the presentation protocol for text conversation, now acknowledged to be the standardised medium for text during a real time multimedia session in all standardised multimedia protocols: H.320, H.324, H.323, 3G.324, SIP, and also in V.18 text telephony, T.120 data conferencing and 3GPP mobile text telephony.

It is intended to be the third default medium taking video telephony into Total Conversation. It gives extra value to any videophone implementation. I work daily with it and often experience the power of the three media of video, text and voice together.

The media flow is character by character, so it gives a live view of the text conversation as the thoughts are formed into typed words, just as the other real time media carries the thoughts as they are formed into spoken words in the audio channel or visual expressions in the video channel.

It is Unicode based and specifies a very limited set of editing controls suitable in a real time text conversation.

It also forms a migration path for text telephone users into new network environments and higher functionality communication services.

For each multimedia protocol, there is a specification about how a T.140 media stream is opened and transported according to the habits in that protocol environment.

All call handling aspects are handled by the multimedia protocol environment.

Services including T.140 text conversation are defined in F.703 Multimedia Conversation Service description.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------ Instant Messaging --------------------------- Instant messaging is more of a complete service in its own right, including addressing, notification, alerting, transmission etc. It is usually regarded to be not really real time conversational. Instead it offers the opportunity to formulate a message first and then transmit the whole message. Some instant message services can enter a real time character by character mode. In that mode, the user experience of the text part is usually very similar to using T.140.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------ Both have very good reasons to exist. Sometimes a real time conversation is most effective for the purpose of developing thoughts and agreements together, sometimes an instant message exchange is more appropriate since it does not require the same real time devotion from the users.

Maybe someone can brief us on the standardisation situation for Instant messaging?

Regards

Gunnar Hellström ------------------------------------------- Gunnar Hellström Omnitor AB Renathvägen 2 SE 121 37 Johanneshov SWEDEN +46 8 556 002 03 Mob: +46 708 204 288 www.omnitor.se Gunnar.Hellstrom@Omnitor.se -------------------------------------------- -----Ursprungligt meddelande----- Från: Mailing list for parties associated with ITU-T Study Group 16 [mailto:ITU-SG16@echo.jf.INTEL.COM]För Paul Long Skickat: den 21 juni 2002 21:29 Till: ITU-SG16@echo.jf.INTEL.COM Ämne: IM and T.140

What's the difference between "instant messaging" in general and T.140? IOW, what can you do with one that you can't do with the other?

Paul Long ipDialog, Inc.