Ford on IM. Ford on IM: Peter Ford, chief architect for MSN Messenger, speaks with Eric Allman in an ACM Queue interview. The first half is heavily about the various protocols, their history and adoption, but the latter half gets into the user experience of various types of messaging. Things that caught my eye included speculation on the eventual integration of the isolated “chat islands”… the distinction between a chatroom as a place and an IM list as a set of relationships… the emphasis on the rapid evolution of messaging interfaces over the next few years. Worth printing out to read. [JD on MX]