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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.""
Furthermore, what about the security issues.. people are going to want to bring in their own copy of AIM/Y!/MSN Messenger to chat with friends.. doesn't this pose a security risk?
When your on their dime you have no rights.
couldnt get anything done without it. Phones are much more distracting- you need to interrupt whatever you're doing for the duration of the conversation, whereas IM can be responded to whenever a free moment is had. 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.
As for turning around and talking to the person who's, after all, sitting right next to me anyway.. that can never lead to anything good.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Since email is typically just stashed on a server somewhere, information and knowledge can accumulate for years before some nosy IT monkey decides to cap off everyone's mailbox limit.
IM, it seems to me, just doesn't have the permanency and longevity that email does.
I have been pwned because my
The people were probably aware that their conversations (on company time) were being recorded and potentially monitored. That might cause you to doubt the accuracy of the results as people knowing they were being monitored might act differently to normal but it seems as though the conversations were over the period of more than a year, not just collected for the purpose of the study so they probably were using it just the way anyone would in the workplace.
How did Isaacs (second study) decide whose IM usage to monitor?
To comply with ethics and privacy laws, did she have to notify users that their IM conversations would be monitored? Or ask them if they accepted that their IM conversations would be monitored?
Also, were the users able to converse via IM with users outside the company? If so, were those conversations monitored as well?
I'm not saying the results are biased, I'm just saying I wish Isaacs revealed more about the sample.
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
Quite often, people exchange quite a bit of crucial information across the convenience of instant messaging: passwords, credit card numbers, personal information, and so on. Unfortunately, IM companies often forget that they leave their messaging completely unsecure, so anyone who can sniff the packets can steal all their information, especially after AOL screwed all PGP encrypted messages when trying to stop Trillian.
In fact, Echelon is infamous for sniffing a lot of traffic from AIM and ICQ, and anyone who thinks MSN is secure is crazy. Even though it might catch some Al-Qaeda terrorists, even they have human rights, including the right to privacy. After all, it might be you who are the terrorist one day, and you might get sent to Camp X-Ray for sending the wrong IM as a joke.
Their gonna hire a bunch of "professors" (one from microsoft, 1 from sun, 1 from spyglass inc, 1 from mit and 2 standalone, and 1 from the government), to write a standard.
These folks will want to do "A VERY GOOD JOB". Like hurd, gnome, oo.org, STL, etc. So they will decide to employ XML, UTF, CORBA and any other useless buzzword pseudo technology hype out there and give us yet another horrible protocol. Like RTCP.
I miss the good old days where RFC worked and people wrote nice FAQs on usenet.
If you monitored them with consent, couldn't that introduce a bias?
If they were monitored without consent, wouldn't that be a breech of privacy?
[Hell no, I didn't read the article. If the answer is there, You will tell me next, won't you?]
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
"I've noticed that people also tend to be more succinct and able to express themselves in quick bursts of text--if there was any problem, you could always pick up the phone on the side."
In some situations this is true, but I guess it only really holds where everyone involved knows the subject domain equally well. for example, I've found the exact opposite: in work we use IRC for realtime tutorials on our DL programming courses and, while most of the students (mainly part time postgrads working at various companies) pick it up quite easily, the most regular problem we encounter is caused by students struggling to formulate succinct and unambiguous questions. Quite often a refinement process is needed to identify the issue the student is having problems with: most of them have no programming background and they are not used to the terminology or the need for accurate problem specifcation, so each aspect of their question needs checking to ensure that the question they thought they asked was the one they asked.
IM, it seems to me, just doesn't have the permanency and longevity that email does.
Actually, IM's ephemeral nature can be selling point. All those conversations about where to go to lunch probably don't deserve long-term storage. Years ago researchers were writing papers about how email was being used for too many incompatible tasks; IM helps solve that problem.
Granted, there are situations where IMs contain useful information or by law must be recorded, but logging IMs is generally easy when necessary.
Clearly you never had an IM conversation with an average teenager. I talk to my sister across IM often, and believe me, the given example isn't so strange.
I've been using instant messaging for many years, but I didn't start using it as a regular part of my work until late 1999 or early 2000 while working at IBM. We had Lotus Sametime, which eventually also became an AIM client, so we could use Sametime to talk with other IBM'ers and AIM for people outside, all in the same chat client.
This came in handy when I left IBM, as I was able to continue communicating with many people at IBM through AIM without their needing to change anything. Since then, some of them have left IBM as well, and we continue to use AIM to communicate. Now that I work at home, these people are my co-workers, although they all have other employers -- and some work at home, some have had periods of not working at all. But we still have this community and it keeps me sane.
I'm a one-man web department at my job and my employer is on the opposite coast. I speak and e-mail with my boss and have a good relationship with him, but he's busy with other things besides me and he's not into IM. Not only do I need the social connection that IM provides, but it's a great technical resource for me as well. There are 2 or 3 of us who bounce questions and ideas off each other. They help me and I help them.
Of course, there's a lot of the social stuff also. We send funny URLs to each other and joke around a lot. It's a duplication of the environment we would have (and indeed used to have) as coworkers in the same office. Many of them are from the same job, but some are from other jobs, so it's like a "greatest hits" album of friends and coworkers from several jobs, some of whom don't know each other at all. It's fascinating and terribly useful.
RP