I don’t know about you, but I’ve grown tired of all the different standards for modern electronic communication.
For instant messaging, some people use MSN, some Yahoo Messenger, some AOL, some Skype - and while there are clients that can handle many of these and more, frequently they do so at the cost of not supporting features like video or audio chat, or by having only hazy support for filesharing. In the world of social networking, there are people’s Twitter feeds, their Facebook statuses…and so on and so forth.
To all of which I say, if you will forgive the American imperative, ‘pick a lane!’ I might even add, ‘Dammit! [sic]‘.
Let us compare with email. No one has to run more than one email client: but that is because email is an open standard, that requires no central service to operate, created before anyone had thought to lock users into a proprietary system to sell them advertising.