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.