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The Business of Instant Messaging
willll writes "The Washington Post is running a story about how AOL plans to make money from Instant Messaging, one of the few successes in recent times for AOL. This article includes plans for corporate versions of AIM as well as discussion on some of the state on instant messaging."
what about ibm (lotus whatever) sametime stuff? its been around before this...
"Its core subscriber base is shrinking, its users are being swamped with junk e-mail,...."
I know one of the reasons family members of mine left was because of the spam. Its insane the crap that gets through to an AOL account. With young members of the family using the accounts it was intollerable. Instead of trying to make money in ways, how about fixing some of the issues with the service and maybe the userbase won't fall. Before long you may start getting new users again. *sigh*
More suggestive is the "serious" use of IM happening on trading desks. Logged, secure, time critical IM. These are the folks who do not screw around. At least not at work. (;
"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
Try using IM in a support environment, where staff don't always have the option of speaking to each other (especially while in a call, or when they are geographically dispersed).
In those situations, IM is really helpful - while taking a call, a tech can run a thought past another staff member, can see if anybody else can reproduce a simple fault, all without interrupting the user.
For those of us in tech support who remember that the user experience is important, little improvements like this can make the difference.
Not at all. We use it 'unofficially' in our company and it's invaluable for tracking which customer site your workmates are at, asking them quick questions that aren't worth the bother of a distracting phone call, discussing stuff in the 'background' while on conference calls - this last one had the unfortunate side-effect once of someone on the conference call not realising they weren't on mute, someone (ok it was me) sent them a funny IM to which they started laughing out loud, for all on the call to hear... oops. Wouldn't live without it!
I don't think that the magic of the service is in the 'nuts and bolts,' what goes on under the hood, but the perception and mindshare that successful marketing of a simple concept creates.
If i'm prepared to pay, or have ads shoved down my throat, in order to gain access to a large userbase (all of whom have been sucked in by the same concept,) then it's gonzo marketing at its best.
Ultimately, though, there does have to be some infrastructure present for this sort of application to work. The model is more 'napster' than 'gnutella.'
I find it ironic, though, that Steve Case and his minions are getting rich off 'hello, a/s/l sweetheart' messages and other such shit.
You're doing it wrong.
In windows XP, your messenger is always on from the getgo, and it's automatically integrated into outlook express. You can even, if you're so inclined, set AOL IM to be your default messenger and see your AIM buddies in outlook express.
.net service). As a tech support manager I can say it definitely increases productivity, and even lessens the frustration of having to wait for a reply email, etc.
At work we use the MSN messenger for its ease of use with exchange server, and use it for in house messenging only. It's handy to be able to talk to people in the office without being hassled by your friends and relatives signed on to the regular service. In windows NT you can even set permissions so that users can't change their account settings (letting them sign onto the
NightmareDNS =)
Here's an idea that I'd really love to see implemented. Imagine if somebody were to come up with a grammar that worked on top of an open instant messaging protocol (jabber?) that encapsulated features useful for developers within an IDE?
The usage scenario would go something like this: I'm working Foo.java and have a question about some line of code. I right click on the line of code and a popup menu appears. I select Discuss, and then a side menu appears that lists my coworkers. The IDE uses "cvs annotate" (if I'm using CVS) to see who last modified the line of code I mouse'd over, and highlights their user id in my "Discuss" menu. I click the author (or anyone else for that matter), and my IDE sends an instant message to the other user indicating that I would like to collaborate on Foo.java. The remote user accepts the collaboration invitation and my version of the code appears in their editor window. At that point we can both edit the file at the same time, ask questions about code, or maybe even share a mouse? (Might be nice to be able to point to some code, ask a question, and have the remote user not only read what you are typing, but SEE what you are referring to).
Anyhow, it's a pipe dream, but man that would be cool.
Do it for da shorties
His point is, AOL didn't invent something like, mp3, or the merge sort, true type fonts or X11. They took a basic net connection, a little db management for buddy lists and a lot of servers to manage connections. No innovation here.
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
A couple of thoughts on this...
1. Anybody who enables IM for the masses, is going to regret it
2. Anybody who allows IM traffic into and out of their organisation, is going to regret it
That said though...
3. Anybody who uses IM for internal communication only can benefit from it
4. IM (internal) can encourage and facilitate interaction between staff who normally never talk (believe me, I've seen it here)
5. IM can be implemented in less than ONE day (again, I did it here in a matter of hours, including client rollout).
Bottom line? (because it all comes down to money):
A few hours of a techs time gave us an in-house communication tool that sees more use than our phones (for short questions between techs). With two helpdesk locations, it has seen a dramatic rise in interaction between the two sites, and a noticable boost in morale.
With the morale issue, I attribute it to a reduced feeling of "being alone". The 1st level support team now "speak" to the 2nd level team regularly via IM - a big improvement in my opinion.
(personally, I'd happily sacrifice a full working day if it yielded just a few conversations between techs who never speak. Or if it saw a few helpdesk calls each week solved faster).
As more and more employees are using products like AIM to communicate, there is a definte need for some accountability with this communication, especially with security and logging.
If I call someone else in the company, the PBX system (or whatever else is in use) can be set up to log the call. Email is very easily tracked and logged.
AIM conversations, however, use a third-party for most of the communication. Logging is not great in most clients.
The article mentions an enterprise solution developed by IBM to help with that, and I think that there is a market for AOL to get into. Provide a plug-and-play either hardware or software solution that allows internal AIM traffic to remain encrypted on the internal network (internal Buddy Lists and so on) and completely logged. There would also have to be a way for the system to work with other AIM users not on the internal network.
The nice thing about a solution like that would be that the logging and traffic could be completely internal, and the company could place restrictions on outside traffic (no file transfers from the outside, for example).
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
Been struggling with allowing customers access to me when I'm sitting down in front of my pc, and I've done a bit of a test.
I found that customers who demand my time more is a great thing, makes customer service all the easier, but let's face it, INSTANT MESSAGING is just that. Instant.
When you say hello to someone, you don't expect them to take 10 min to say hello back.
When you leave a voicemail, you expect a reply in one business day unless you mark it urgent. With email you expect a response back what? Half day?
I equate an IM an IMMEDIDATE priority even if I'm busy with something else.
Personally, I have seen customers only let down by me not able to keep up with IM customers fast enough.
Great idea, but in the end, the purchasing agents, CEO's with decision making ability and the standards committee's don't have time for me, let alone IM me.
Any other account managers successfully integrate this into their 100-200 customer/month workday?
Yo Grark
Canadian Bred with American Buttering.
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
At my last job they deployed an IM client over the entire company and it proved to be a huge benefit. In fact, the general counsel issued guidelines on when the text of an IM conversation needed to be saved.
The benefits of IM, as I see it are:
- The ability to talk with a colleague on an asynchronous basis
- The ability to see if someone was at their computer
- A reduction in "non-work" related wandering
At first I was skeptical of IM, but after having it for awhile, I much prefer it over the phone. My current employer does not use it and find I am not as productive.Did I miss something in the article or what? I didn't see ANY mention of how AOL plans on turning a profit. Not much more than the very old news that there "should" be a way to turn that many eyeballs into dollars. I wouldn't bet on it.
As to all the folks whining on about how awful IM is in the workplace, I couldn't disagree more. A couple years back our sales force started using IM to message eachother, as it was the only way to communicate while on the phone. This spread to other areas of the company, and has grown in importance to how we do business.
For example, say a salesman has a customer on the phone and needs detailed inventory data that only the purchasing folks have. Rather than putting that customer on hold, an IM over to the right person and the call never has to go on hold to get an answer.
Like any other Internet technology, there's a fair amount of non-business related communication going on. This doesn't even begin to outweigh the benefits IM has had at my company. YMMV.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
I'm not talking about Trillian Pro here.
I'm talking about a professionally written program that supports both UNIX and Win32 (using QT, perhaps), doesn't crash every few hours (WTF is up with all the crappy IM clients that crash more than Win 3.1?), implements REAL features, has technical support (for those luser friends of mine who can't figure out how to install AIM, even when I talk them through it), and doesn't use ads or spyware.
Here are the features I want:
I've come to the conclusion that I must write this software myself. Nobody else is going to implement a portable, spyware and ad free IM client that doesn't constantly crash.
If someone beats me to it, I guess I'll pony up my cash. But I'm sort of hoping to get a free ride on my own protocol specification.
And please don't suggest Trillian Pro. Thank you.
You are assuming that it is a bunch of teeny-bopper 14-year-olds using the program. Well, believe me, it isn't.
I have had many deep, meaningful conversations with my intelligent friends on it, and they did not contain merely "lol"s and "sups". AIM is widely used by those of college-age, I assure you, and is as popular as cell-phone communication by many (more popular by me as I can't afford a fancy cell phone plan)
And AIM is a good way to talk to people that are long distance FREE, like my parents from college. What other non-IM technology such as this is available that is CHEAPER than FREE? And also teachable to a mother who does not understand computers all that well?
AIM is very convenient to use b/c many of my friends use DSL/Cable/dorm ethernet connections and we can stay on forever and are very reachable through these connections. If we're home, we're probably on AIM. Very convenient for homework questions, conversations about your day, listening to a friend who's mother just died, I mean WHATever you need to talk about. It is not what you people seem to think it is. It has totally taken off with my generation (I'm 18) and is a large part of our culture.
In conclusion, IMs are very productive, cheap, efficient, and easy-to-use forms of communication. If you have a lot of friends and family using it, it is way better than the telephone, and is certainly not non-sensical if used in the ways that my friends and I use it.
The Present is the point at which time touches eternity. - C.S. Lewis
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
You seem to have missed the point. The technologies you mentioned are great when you don't know whether or not the person is there. However, it's difficult to have a conversation over e-mail or voice mail, and that's where IM shines. IM is not about leaving a message for somebody, but engaging them in conversation when you can't speak to them in person. Yes, you could use the telephone, but you don't know for sure if they're there or not, and that also involves interrupting whatever you happen to be doing at the moment. IM let's you know when somebody is available, and you can ping back and forth without having to walk across the building or stop your work to pick up the phone.
A good example of IM technology being used in a "business" would be my college job as a computer lab sitter. During each shift, there were sitters at all of the different labs on campus, and we were all in contact through an internal IRC server. It made it very easy to keep in touch with other sitters, and even managers. We could ask questions of the other sitters when we didn't know the answer, and doing it over IRC was a lot less disruptive than telling the user, "Hold on while I call over to another lab." One advantage this system has over IM is that for a small group, we were all in the same channel (chat room, conference, party line, whatever you want to call it), so if one sitter was away from his desk, any of the others could still see the question and help out.
The auto-away works really well.
If I'm not typing for more than 30 seconds, it shows AWAY, which is right.
And I've been reading good articles in business magazines which shows how IM is actually better than email, in that you can SEE when someone is there, then send them an email.
Knowing when a customer is there is certainly quite helpful, and in return, they know when you're there.
I still like the idea personally.
Yo Grark
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
What's wrong with Trillian Pro?
.ini file (no registry crap), keeps your contact list in an .xml file...
It's modular, looks nice (well, the default skin is a bit gaudy, but there are perfectly normal skins available), doesn't crash, doesn't use loads of memory, makes an effort to support encryption (although it doesn't sign your logs), keeps the logs in a straight text file (stupid ICQ database! ugh!), keeps all its settings in its own
What's there not to like?
Just a question, but with AOL, Yahoo and MSN all making plays for the Corperate IM market, where is Jabber?
I know it could really help out in the organisation that I work at as we have offices right across the country and its bloody expensive to get all the execs together for a meeting. If Jabber had Video/Audio support it would be just what the doctor ordered.
If I wasn't already building something else, I might even take it on myself.
Yes and more.
Its a great tool *especially* in an IT environment.
But rather than IM I prefer to setup internal IRC. The reason? Bots.
Your bot can learn the things that are common to your IT information environment.
Whats really nice is say you have an agreed upon standard for IT nomenclature etc...
You can the hop on IRC (which not to mention works wonders when your IT staff are geographically dispersed) and type in: PDC01-SITE1 (if that was the name of your PDC for example) and the bot can reply with info -like IP etc..
Or it can make fun of it for you....
The other really valuable thing about it is having IRC for allowing development groups to be able to hop on and ask offline questions (questions that dont require stopping in at an office - or hitting some IT person up in the hallway)....
and yet ANOTHER key feature of all this is - LOGGING.
You can log all your conversations for use in compiling great FAQs - and you can use the bot to this end as well....
Other than this specific use - I never use IRC... but you IM quite a bit for friends.
but IRC for IT - IM for users to user communication.
I would encourage both in any organization, so long as users are aware that all communications are logged on the corporate IM of choice. Whether you setup a policy regarding AIMing and IMing with ppl outside the co is up to you.
My big problem is that Trillian Pro isn't portable. I can't run it on my Linux PC, and I certainly can't run it on my DEC Alpha. I'd really, really like to be able to do that.
The second problem is that Trillian Pro only adopts other protocols, crashing or not working when the protocol changes. That's not their fault. But I don't want to have to constantly upgrade Trillian whenever someone else changes their protocol specification. I'd like for them to implement an open protocol in addition to the legacy protocols. Once the open protocol acheives critical mass, the legacy protocols can be abandoned.
My third problem is that Trillian went from being a hobbyist effort to a commercial product. It shows. Instead of a dialogue popping up saying, "I'm sorry, but the AIM protocol has been changed. This requires an update to the AIM module. Click here to update this module now.", I get a crash. "Huh," I say to myself. "I'll just start it up again, and see if it happens again." Yep. It silently crashes. So, I decide to go to www.trillian.cc and download a newer version. That fixed it. But what if I was a computer illiterate person who had no idea what was wrong? This is not professionally written software.
My last problem is that Trillian isn't a real company -- who do you call for technical support? Who do you contact for site licenses, and how much do they cost? Do they sell corporate versions that are customizable?
Like I said, Trillian isn't really what I'm looking for. It sounds like it, at first, but then you realize it's just another hobbyist Win32 program that's trying to become commercial. I don't want that. I want something that has been designed from the start to be user friendly, easy to use, and cuddles the user. I don't need this, but my friends do. They can't handle it when a Win32 program crashes back to the desktop.
But you do make some good points.
Here's the "Jabber Enhancement Proposal":t ml
http://www.jabber.org/jeps/jep-0058.h
There're tons of other interesting JEPs as well:
http://www.jabber.org/jeps/jeplist.php
Check 'em out!
I work in a company with 4 locations, two on the West Coast, one in the Rockies, and one on the East Coast. I send/receive on the order of 300 IM's per day, discussing any topic from customer issues to what I had for dinner last night. I have resolved at least 4 customer issues today alone utilizing *only* IM; another employee has the customer on the phone and I am able to work with the employee to determine the issue and resolve it remotely *without having to get directly involved via phone*. That's it, the customer's issue is resolved and they are happy; both I and my co-worker can get back to work (immediately) knowing that our customer is satisified.
And it didn't take an email, a trouble ticket, or 4-24 hours to get completed (these are regular process for dealing with issues that technicians can't personally resolve immediately).
While not *all* of my IM's are work-related in the strictest sense, about 85% of my traffic is directly related to my work directives. And the rest saves me from having to walk over/drive over/call over to speak with people who I would normally shoot the proverbial "bull" with anyway.
Unproductive? I think you're eating too many paint chips.
That's true. It is certainly a helpful tool when the person you want to speak to isn't next to you.
My company, an IT solution provider, uses IM for the majority of inter-office communications. When you're working on a project with a 50 man team scattered between 3 continents (US, Europe and India (well... Asia. Whatever)), then IM is the only practical solution.
Emails are ok, but you never get proper discourse. Phones are crap because they are expensive and, unless you record them, unlogged. IM is perfect. No need to be too polite, you can ignore it if you're doing something else, or answer immediately and get a quick understanding of the real problem, and make sure your answer is understood (or vice versa).
I've worked with a number of clients in recent years, and more and more of them - even the non-tech-focussed companies - are coming around to the idea that IM is an efficient means of communication. As far as I'm concerned it's an *essential* tool for distributed teams. We couldn't have done half the work we do now without it.
Of course, having said all that, Jabber r00lz.
If you can't see this, click here to enable sigs.
There's no requirement to justify why it has to be installed, no limitations on whom you can talk to, no costs in managing it (if the user can't manage it they can't use it), no licenses to purchase. The same account works at home and at work.
Sure, IT depts love the opportunity to manage it - but this is much more about budget increases and power/control than it is about improving the bottom line.
you have seemed to forget about how AOL also has
[1] several thousand employees, if not many more.
[2] an entire network infastructure to support AOL.com and its many other domains and websites(all the AOL keyword websites are hosted on AOL Servers), its 35 million users. Im sure that costs a few dollars or so.
[3] countless dollars invested in Research, Marketing and those damned Free AOL CD's
I follow the SDK and GDN principles.. Spelling Dont Kount, Grammer Dont Neither
Point in case; there are plenty of bots available for jabber servers. Join any of the public groupchats conference.jabber.org hosts and there are often bots hanging around with that "common knowledge." Additionally, there are plenty of examples of bots already around built upon the numerous APIs to jabber, including a number written in perl against NET::Jabber.
I personally use one that checks my presence and sends me messages if mail shows up in my inbox and I'm in one of the availability modes I've defined as meaning I'd like to hear biff bark.
Hey, don't be too hard on the guy, at least he's honest. He knows he's a freak, and so filed himself in my freaks list as he appropriately...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
if you are spending money then doesnt make more sense to just hire jabber team to tweak it for you?
:)
you hire the experts who actually build it.
you can keep the source.
you support open source.
your karma goes up.
I think its better use of money.
I use sametime it at work, where I am now, so that when I'm not reading slashdot, I still have something other than work to take up my time :) I like it, and I'm told it can be tied to the AIM network, but at my company it is internal only. Sametime just seems a little more professional than AIM, no big banner ads, a company wide address book that works, no stupid colors, fonts, buddy icons. I like having the seperation between work and home, as I don't want to talk to friends during the day, and I don't want to talk to coworkers at night.
-- the computer doesn't want any beer, no matter how much you think it does. NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer.