Everyone thinks about building Rich Internet Applications using the old HTTP transport mechanism, but perhaps Instant Messaging (and particulary the Jabber - XMPP protocol) is better positioned to become the platform for building them. Jabber is well suited for this role because, just as HTTP, is as an universal protocol, not tied to any operating system or other platform.

Of course it is hard to predict anything here, because one need to take into account not only the technical advantages of one technology over the other but also all the habits people developed when using and thinking about particular technology. This is crucial because it is people who develope applications for platforms and without applications a platform will never gain enough momentum. But bots, chatrooms and other extensions just now offer possibilities for new applications all adding to the critical mass. This is very similar to the role of CGI in HTTP.

The advantages of Jabber over HTTP:

* with less entrenched habits can change faster than other technologies
* uses a continues connection instead of the stateless transactions of HTTP

This prediction will work only when IM authors would give up producing new incompatible protocols and instead focuse on one common basic technology (the best candidate, backed by IETF, is of course Jabber) and only add extensions to support for new functions.

Examples of IM applications:

* Huminity Social Networking in IM (Social Networking fits better to IM than to web since IM from the beginning use the same basic vocabulary - 'friends lists')