ReadWriteWeb

In just over two weeks, Kik Messenger, the iPhone app that could quickly replace text messages, has registered more than 1 million users, and for good reason. If you're not usually a follower or a wagon-jumper, this is the time to become one, because Kik offers real-time communication, free, over a number of different platforms.

Not only is this app massively popular for a reason, but that same reason may be why you won't see it in the app store soon and time might be running out to grab a copy.

Salesorce.com acquired Jigsaw earlier this year. This past week, Salesforce.com unveiled the integration.

The service integrates Chatter, the Salesforce.com microblogging platform. When a contact is updated through Jigsaw, the subscriber gets an update in their Chatter feed.

Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM is an example of how microblogging services are becoming message platforms for crowdsourcing tools. Microblogging tools are serving as social middleware technologies that surface information from enterprise applications.

Twitter client developers will be pleased to note that popular light blogging platform Tumblr now supports a Tweetie and Twitterific compatible API. In a recent blog post, the company explains how the API will help Twitter clients support Tumblr. While the release allows for similar posting and reading capabilities to last week's WordPress API announcement, it's a coup for those looking to Twitter to become the open messaging standard.

It's been two years since ReadWriteWeb last published the Thunderbird 2 review. Since then Thunderbird has been restructured away from Firefox into Mozilla Messaging and the group is finally releasing its desktop email application, Thunderbird 3. While the launch has been widely anticipated, the fact that the entire project is open source means that the company's point releases have been hashed out in clear view. ReadWriteWeb caught up with CEO of Mozilla Messaging David Ascher to hear about the latest updates to Thunderbird as well as the company's plans for open conversation aggregator Raindrop.

Silentale is a soon-to-launch startup whose goal is to consolidate your conversations and contacts from all the platforms you use including webmail, social networks, and even your mobile phone. Running as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform on top of Amazon Web Services, the oddly named Silentale will function not just as an aggregator, but also a searchable archive of all your web communication. While normally we wouldn't dare blog about a company whose product you couldn't try out yet (that's just mean), we just couldn't resist. It's been a long time since we've seen a startup this promising and we can't wait to give it a shot ourselves.

Google today announced a new Internet-based communications and collaboration platform; Google Wave. While some of the details are still a bit sketchy, Google Wave looks to be an integrated communications platform that brings together email, chat, photo-sharing, and collaborative editing features. Google describes a 'wave' as "equal parts conversation and document" and the Wave team basically sees it as a replacement for email and other collaboration tools.

Full Disclosure: this is an opinionated rant. Why do I have to go to LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to send messages? Why do people insist on using these non-standard messaging systems? If people said, "Don't call me on the telephone -- I prefer the delephone," you would think they were crazy. For a while, this was a minor inconvenience, but now it is starting to get out of control.

Mobile messaging is experiencing a period of record growth, according to some figures released from VeriSign earlier this week. Looking at the numbers more closely, some interesting trends emerge. Those include the use of messaging for social and political change, marketing, such as that done by U.S. President-elect Barack Obama's mobile campaign, and the use of mobile messaging for charitable donations. Other sectors experiencing significant increases are the enterprise and financial institutions. In those two areas alone, mobile messaging has seen a 115% increase in only a year's time, and much of that is thanks to the financial industry's adoption of the medium for business to consumer communication.