> They are not mutually exclusive Diminishing the active population of a service may result in less software development targeting it - resulting in a death sp

> They are not mutually exclusive Diminishing the active population of a service may result in less software development targeting it - resulting in a death spiral to the profit of the centralized services who reached critical mass. Even when the open protocol becomes dominant through network effect, when a major service provider attracts a significant population fraction he can fork into a centralized proprietary direction : see for example how Google used XMPP to strengthen its initial Google Talk user base and then cut them off from the rest of the XMPP world... Embrace, extend, extinguish. I'm still using IRC - but it is an IT ghetto. I'm still using XMPP - but only with technophile friends, my family or other people to whom I am a prescriptor. This decline may be caused by chat no longer being considered a standalone functionality but an adjunct to web applications that implement a social network...