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This has all kind of happened before with MSN, Yahoo, AOl, etc and the corporations have closed it all off again[0]. I'm not holding out hope for the future. I believe it will be all closed protocols and tightly tied to whatever platform owns the protocol.

[0] Not that it was all that open, but at least we had third party apps.

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In the book, 'The Lean Startup' author Eric Ries actually used this strategy for his messaging company IMVU. Essentially he wanted to do the same thing I am doing, but for MSN, Yahoo, Aim, etc. It ended up being a catastrophic fail in one of the most read books in the startup world. Can you blame anyone for not trying it?!

Though this isn't where I got the idea, I read about it the other day when I had some downtime.

I accept your challenge and will prove the future is in fact quite bright! :)

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