IM Usage & Awareness Services

CowboyRobot writes "Queue has two related articles on Instant Messaging. The first, written by two Sun Labs researchers, looks at the lack of standards in IM protocols, as well as the preception that the distracting nature of IM precludes it from being a more useful communications medium. Their solutions involve new 'Awareness Services' and they summarize three research prototypes: 'Awarenex', 'Rhythm Awareness', and 'Lilsys'. The second includes the results of an AT&T Labs study of IM use. Among the findings, "Despite the perception that IM is commonly used for social purposes in the workplace, we found that was rarely the case. Only 13 percent of the conversations we monitored included any personal topics whatsoever, and only 6.4 percent were exclusively personal.""

Comments

AOL and others trying to market IM

[pvt_medic]

There is a growing momentum though for corporate versions of IM software. While I know AOL is not the only one, it is a quick and easy example. AOL has info about its corporate IM service. With a overview of what they offer here.

Can a study monitoring IM be impartial?

[trystanu]

Where did the data for the study come from?

Were the participants informed that their conversations were to be monitored during this period? from study 2

"303,648 messages comprising 21,213 conversations between 692 pairs of people".

It sounds like they sampled a single population (only 700 users), perhaps from a single organisation that knew they were being monitored? If so the data surely needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

IM does make a good collarboration tool

[Maestro4k]

I used to be a sysadmin for an Electrical and Computer Engineering dept. at a large university a few years back. I found that students used IM a lot, and that a large amount of the time they were using it to collaborate with friends who were home, or in another lab etc. So there is some truth to this.

That being said though, the main problem I had with IM was the security problems with service-provided clients (AIM, ICQ, Etc.) and the problems with multi-user windows environments and user privacy for the universal clients (Trillian, etc.). We ended up having to officially ban IM because of these issues. To be honest, the biggest concern was the privacy issues. We found quickly that most of the IM clients wouldn't behave properly for a non-privledged domain user. (Ironically, MSN flat out wouldn't work at all unless you had admin privledges.) We could get Trillian to work under all user accounts, but we ended up with a problem where Trillian would default to keeping its log files locally, not in the user's profile. To make it worse, those files were readable by all, and locking them down broke Trillian. Being a University, we couldn't risk the privacy issues, and it was becoming too much of a headache to spend more time on it. We had much more pressing matters to take care of. Oh yes, on our linux machines I never blocked the universal clients, as I didn't have the problems with them. I just left it as an easter egg for observant users. :)

If the big IM players would get their acts together and standardize, and stop blocking universal clients, we might finally get some good, secure, and multi-user workable clients. Then we can find out how useful IM really is or isn't. Untll then, it'll probably stay marginalized.

thet need some way to manage the ids though

[the_2nd_coming]

perhaps like how Apple has done by integrating presence into mail.app, so a person can search their e-mail directory, click on their AIM name and send an IM.

Re:Wow! Awareness is not a buzzword

[.nuno]

I've been working and integrating with Lotus Sametime for some years now and it's "awareness" is quite impressive.

Sametime's awareness allows us, for instance, to easily display on a web page which ones of your buddys are also browsing through the same page (and this is done server side). The same thing with Lotus Notes and any Notes-based application. In the new Notes 6.5 you can right-click the name of someone who sent you an e-mail and start chatting with them.

In no way I want to defend Sametime, it has a long way to go in user-friendliness (it's so bad that even IBM created an alternate client, NotesBuddy)and inter-connectivity, but it does make it very easy to be "aware" of the status of your fellow workers by, for instance, showing a green square just before their names in your inbox.

Say you got a mail from your boss refusing your raise - you can quickly see he's online and bump through is office with half the company routers and some ethernet cables just to "get him a strong message of disagreement".

So, I strongly believe that awareness is not a buzzword anymore.

usually it's covered in the policy handbook

[SolemnDragon]

Most large US companies have some kind of blanket statement for 'computer and electronic media use' which covers phone conversations as well. Usually it's in with the 'i will not make personal phone calls to distant countries' clauses. In some cases it's a message that pops up every time you boot up your computer. And it's there for exactly those reasons: Your email and IM may be monitored, your web use may be monitored, and they may not tell you. IT's gotten some interesting challenges in recent years, but most of the time it serves to keep employees from suing because the company can point to it and say, "But we told you right up front."

Doesn't mean it's right, and the 'reasonable expectation of privacy,' has come up over and over. But companies still seem to think that it's the best way to do it, i guess.

Re:IM in the workplace

[fruey]

It has a sense of urgency to it which Email does not- when you send an e-mail, you can't be sure that anyone will even respond.

Precisely. People don't respond to email. That's where IM has the advantage - you KNOW when people are online (and willing to be seen as online), and therefore they actually have to have an excuse as to why they don't reply.

Spam, poor email strategy in the workplace, lack of tracking, problems with the traces email leave... all mean that IM works in a completely different paradigm than email, and I personally find it very useful in the workplace.

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[Anonymous Coward]

For the record Sun Microsystems has their own Instant Messaging product. And internally, they use a mix of their own messaging product and Jabber. A necessity as many engineers in the company work remotely or from home as reported by an earlier Slashdot story (approximately 13,000 employees working remote).

Re:Email is the only way to go

[AbbyNormal]

Most IM programs have the ability to log chats to a specific directory. I believe Trillian does it by default for each user you IM.
I have found myself going back to those logs frequently when discussing coding projects.

If you need to maintain a backup, burn the old logs to a cd or just log the messages to a backed up file server.