Rather than focusing on a single standard, the members of IMUnified, a group of IM providers and developers working together, are trying to make their respective applications work with the others. But not everyone is waiting on a standards body. There are several open-source movements under way that hope to make the standards debate moot. It's a lot easier to create a standard when there is not a lot of commercial interest at stake, but this industry is too evolved. They have never reached a consensus because there are too many parties at stake.
Open source represents accessibility.
Accessibility leads to ubiquity and ubiquity leads to infrastructure. Instant messaging is turning out to be that thing. It's much better to have the presence information live where all the rest of my information lives rather than locked in one little IM application. Smith says this approach allows a user to see whether someone on the contact list is online. They can then click the name to initiate communications.