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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."
First post and all, but....
I have successfully implemented IM at a number of large organisations here in Australia.
Microsoft decided ages ago to start charging for the service with the release of Titanium (Exchange 2003), so it's hardly news that IM can be profitable.
Good to hear other vendors are getting involved, but until AOL pull their act together in terms of marketing and security, no corporate IT department in it's right mind would deploy their stuff.
that the most trivial application of the internet is the most profitable?
I mean sending text from peer to peer is pretty much the "hello world" of TCP/IP 101.
Sure the clients are a little more advanced, but the base concept is the same.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Seeing as the advertising revenue has gone down the can in recent months, how can they expect to make money?
Are people willing to pay for instant messaging?
Josh
hookers and grits.
Perhaps they could charge by the lol or 'omg u 2' used on their services? Make money and maybe even improve the interweb a little at the same time.
"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
..While it has no plans to charge consumers for the existing service, AOL is considering selling add-ons such as matchmaking and games.
It seems like we could be seeing another piece of IM software drifting down the ICQ "bloatware" path. IMHO, as far as IM is concerned, especially when the aim is to expand into the corporate arena, the less features the better.
Ladies, form queue here -->
Amongst other things, AIM still needs some sort of Quality of Service guarentees thrown into the protocol...thus saving conversations like,
...watch...it'll happen!
Tech Peon: Sorry boss, I didn't get the IM informing me I've been laid off due to the tech downturn.
CEODude: But I sent it via AIM to you.
Tech Peon: Ah...putting all our faith into AIM streamlining operations, are we?
These concerns are largely unfounded. Any organization that uses a groupware (e.g. Exchange/Outlook) package already has virtually instant messaging through their standard email conduit. Similar predictions were offered when high-speed access to the web came to employee's desktops. As with the web, novelty wears off quickly and everyone still needs to get their job done. In my experience, using IM in the office reduces the impulse for someone to walk to my cube and interrupt me face to face for something "quick" that becomes protracted and a more significant time sync as we converse. I see IM as a filter for "time-suckers".
I used it in school - a lot. It is great for sending little snippets of code to friends as a sanity check. It's also a great way to stay in touch with friends and family on the other side of the country - you can always tell that someone is there and available to talk, and the conversation is instantaneous.
I think this would be a great tool for large (think multi-national) companies - it would allow them to bring all of their resources together and I believe it would allow teamwork on a higher level. Of course, this could probably be accomplished with e-mail as well, but IM - as the article said - has that "presence" and spontanaety that really works for good collaboration.
One last note - I haven't used Netmeeting or similar things yet, but I think it would be a good bet that the way for this type of collaboration software to really get its foot in the door or corporate America is through IM.
Now all that is left is to get a large acceptance of a nice, open protocol for IM - that is at least the one way it should be more like e-mail!
-Montag
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!
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
I believe that it is this simplicity that is part of what makes AIM so popular. The average AIM user, which never seemed to be very bright to me, could probably really appreciate the straightforward approach AIM takes to instant messaging. ICQ, which is almost the exact opposite, might repulse those same users, but since AOL owns both, then all is good! They are making use of the best of both worlds, it seems.
However, I currently use Yahoo as my primary messenger, and I have no intention of switching. As far as I'm concerned, Yahoo has found a happy medium, and provides, in my opinion, a much more effecient and useful system than the aforementioned clients.
What AOL should be afraid of is users migrating away from them if they get too pushy on the dollar, though since they claim not to be charging money for existing services, they ought to be secure in this area.
Though I'm not a personal supporter of AOL, I do think that they definitely do have a good opportunity for growth, and believe that any innovations they make might help to benefit everyone.
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
Another technology that you probably fear is P2P sharing. This is another useful tool that I believe will start to make an impact on the business world. Locutus is what I have set up for them, and they are able to share documents/media that have had to have been requested while still making sure priveleges and security are a priority.
Perhaps you didn't like the computer -- imagine the gaming that would go on...
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
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
Productivity will come to a halt, and innovation will be stagnant for 10-15 years as a result.
Are you for real? That's quite a "doomsayer" prediction.
A corporate IM solution will have the option to limit who you can connect to (ie, no one outside the company). Those whose productivity comes to a halt, will be the same people that spends all day chatting with co-workers over other means: telephone, water cooler, whatever.
No sig
If only AOL expanded their instant messenger service. Sure you can type and they can type back, but what if you could actually hear the person you were chatting with? Maybe this could even be done in "Real Time." We could come up with a device so you could walk around the room and talk at the same time without tricky networking setup. We could take everyone's name and give it a number and put them in a big book so that if you wanted to chat with someone and didn't know their number you could look it up. It would even have their address!
Think of the possibilities!
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.
Considering that you have email, which you can connect to a pager in case they aren't there, the telephone (ah, old faithful) with voicemail which also can be paging you in case you miss an important call, your cell phone which many of us have permanently attached to our ears, and the list goes on and on and on....
Personally were I running a business this is about the last thing in the world I would bother spending any money on. That's just me though. Maybe there is some great benefit to this that I don't see. Someone make me a case for why I would need to spend some money on something like this. I'm curious here. Doubtlessly there's got to be something I'm missing.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Mr. Shein wants to legalize spam and allow ISP to charge for it, a position that I completely oppose. Shein's proposal will result in more spam and flood our in-boxes with even more junk. Meanwhile, users are grabing any technology that is less spam friendly (and not acrane and difficult to use).
One of the beauties of Jabber, and also one that hasn't received as much attention as it should IMHO, is that is can connect to pretty much every other network out there. Granted this is a server feature, just having a Jabber client doesn't mean you get this connectivity.
.edu. Even though we have software policies (both ethical and those mandated physically on the network) we still find students installing every known IM client to man. To solve this we installed a Jabber server with transports that would allow it to connect to MSN/Yahoo/ICQ/AIM/IRC/etc.. and installed a Jabber client on each machine. Then we created policy stating that you can connect to any network you need to, but you must use the Jabber client to do so. Once students get over the hump of figuring out YAIMC, they actually enjoy being able to login once and be connected to any network with which they have an account. It also concretely gives them no excuse to install any other IM client on our machines.
FEX:
I admin at an
At home I've taken to doing the same thing. I run a local Jabber server with a full transport setup and just connect to myself with my client. It's a bit backwards, but pays off in desk space and effeciency in the end.
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.
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.
What I'm interested in seeing in the IM software is how they are going to set up the hierarchy. Will the sensitive business information exchanged between two engineers designing the next best product be traveling around the internet? Or will AOL release a client/server model that will allow a company to contain their information and optional contain messages from/to the outside world?
My two cents is that most businesses are more ready to take a Microsoft answer in the all-in-one suite or find a open solution if their staff has the time. Besides, AOL IMer is nowhere near business app status.
And to those that don't think IMs have a place in business or that people just trade smiley faces all day, you haven't seen how many meetings are avoided by simple online real-time at-your-own-computer-and-chair chat.
It's a historical accident that, instead, we have this kludgy, centralized, closed infrastructure that's owned by AOL and a few other players. If AOL goes away and takes their "free service" with them, all the better, as far as I'm concerned. But we'll probably have to listen to this kind of whining over and over again.
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 have only one thing to say:
$ write user
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
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.