iChat needs a rework ASAP… more social network friendly features needed

iChat, an easy to use and the videoconferencing jewel of Mac OS X, has been collecting dust for years, receiving minors tweaks and updates, but left out of the social revolution happening on the internet. With iChat Apple opted to used AIM login account (a decadent messaging system, father of all of its class) only supported by AOL (its owner) and Apple in iChat, AIM had its glory, but the retarded burocracy at AOL+TimeWarner+CNN and many other media companies smashed together put it out of the net radar.

The strange, but true about iChat is that is mandatory to have an AIM account in order to use it or shell out $99 a year for a MobileMe account, but with free alternative like Skype, it seems that somebody has a reality problem at Apple, I won’t compare the video quality of iChat with the same feature provided by Skype, but free is the best feature of any application and the whole accounts creation process in Skype, quick and easy, not credit card or long AIM forms to fill, places Apple in the ice age.

With Facebook, Twitter and may other social networks growing exponentially is almost unbelievable that iChat is totally isolated and while this isolation may guarantee a better integrated product with others Apple applications, it doesn’t happen, today diversity and network flavors force us to have many social applications to interact with friends, families and teammates, but iChat is the only application without this kind interaction, not Facebook or Twitter, not outside connections, instead, you are forced to have Adium, Twitter and iChat to get all bases covered.

A good example of how to master interaction is Adium, which lets you have your friends from Facebook, Yahoo, MSN, GoogleTalk, Jabbers and many others Social Networks in a single window, without any performance or interaction hit. I know Apple can do better than that, like a streaming video application for Facebook that lets your friend use to reach you in iChat, the use of your Twitter, Facebook, MySpace login account to start iChat will be more than perfect, I don’t need to be forced to have an account in AIM just to use iChat, Apple needs to wake up and quickly, this is unbelievable.

With iTunes, the iPod, iPhone and other media devices from Apple is seem almost out of this world that Apple hasn’t embraced the social network interaction in its own applications or even a Skype plugin to provide a better mac experience, to have 3 or 5 applications running is nothing but a waste of productivity and time,

In real world only a few of your friends have macs, while the other has Windows and Linux PCs, people needs to interact with them via the internet and now throught these social networks, with Apple applications is IMPOSSIBLE.