IMPP: A new instant messaging standard and its impact on Internet business

There are already more than 130 million instant messaging users worldwide. This paper describes our research and development to apply the power of ins tant messaging, especially that of the "buddy list," to electronic commerce . We have been engaged in standardization for instant messaging at the lnte rnet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to make an open and secure standard call ed IMPP. AOL dominates the current market, but the protocols of AOL lack se curity. Therefore, they are not suitable for electronic commerce. We have s ubmitted our own version of IMPP to the IETF that enables selective publica tion of presence. In this paper, we describe an application of the selectiv e publication of presence for electronic commerce. We also describe our PeP P prototype under development.