CCATP #722 – Tom Merritt on the Past, Present, and Future of Messaging

This week’s guest on Chit Chat Across the Pond is Tom Merritt, host of the Daily Tech News Show, Cord Killers, Know a Little More, Sword and Laser and more podcast than I can count. He’s also a science fiction author with his book series Pilot X tommerrittbooks.com. I asked Tom to come on Chit Chat to help me “know a little more” (see what I did there?) about the past, present and future of messaging. We start by talking about the grand old days when on the computer we had interoperable messaging services, and later at least a way to aggregate the protocols so we could use one client to talk over different services. We covered SMS and the “new and improved” RCS from 2007 protocols when he explained the roles that carriers play in implementation. We talk about the green/blue bubble problem with splintered messages and how RCS might be able to help if Apple would implement it, and why they probably won’t. Finally, we talk about the DMA (Digital Markets Act - see Bart’s deep dive on this during Security Bits for 3 April 2022 (https://www.podfeet.com/blog/2022/04/sb-2022-04-03/)) starting to work its way through the European Commission and how Tom interprets the possible/probable ways the big companies might implement the changes demanded surrounding messaging. I tried to get Tom to say he was optimistic that we may one day soon have an integrated messaging service to rule them all but I wasn’t quite successful. You can keep up with everything Tom Merrit by signing up for Tom’s newsletter at FreeTomNewsletter.com