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

how was this legal?

[Anonymous Coward]

how is it legal to monitor IM sessions without
the other parties consent?

Wow!

[Decaffeinated Jedi]

"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."

Wow... that's pretty surprising. I'm hard-pressed to come up with any non-personal uses for IM in the workplace.

Meanwhile, from the first article:

"That is, beyond the instant text-chat capability and sense of presence among online colleagues that IM provides, what other cues of activity should collaborators share to help coordinate their work? When a person you want to contact is not present, what information can the system provide to help you coordinate contact in the future? Even when you are physically present, can the system provide cues for when you are mentally receptive, or 'available,' to being interrupted?"

Don't most (if not all) IM clients do that already with their status alerts and away messages? If you ask me, "awareness services" sounds like just another new buzzword for an old idea...

Re:Wow!

[sql*kitten]

I'm hard-pressed to come up with any non-personal uses for IM in the workplace.

Round here, we often use IM as a means to communicate hard-to-say items while on the phone - shell commands, lines from .ini files, SQL queries, code snippets. Another good use is to check if it's a convenient time to phone. Another is to leave time-sensitive notes "it will be ready in 5 minutes". Or to leave notes for people "so and so called" since everything is timestamped.

Basically, IM is ultra-lightweight email, and once you're used to it, it's a great time saver. Now we just use email for things that are expected to persist or for things that need to be refined before being sent.

Best Work Tool Ever

[fuzzybunny]

I had an 18 month project at a major international investment bank, helping them put together their firewall/network security team.

They had a purely internal IRC backbone; officially, the company used Interchange chat (piece of crap), but at the time, all IRC clients could connect. I found this to be the most amazing productivity tool I've ever seen.

A web page allowed "registration" of channels and bots, although generally all the usual IRC flexibility was kept (dynamic channel creation, 1-1 chat, etc.) Users' workstation logins were automatically used as chat logins by the IC clients; their only other real additional use was quick file uploads, which generated a link from the channel bot (assuming there was one) that was posted to the whole channel.

Loads of people got in touch with us that way, to ask us about architecture or production question; it was great, as it took away the slowness, asynchronous nature ("me too!") and fear of leaving a paper trail (hence formality) of email, and allowed far better conferencing with larger groups of people than the phone. 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.

The thing was also good for quickly sending (DCC) files around, production and support teams scripted massive numbers of bots to reply to a wide number of queries (phone, dns, system/application status), and it allowed people to keep an eye on technical issues that arose which might affect them, without having to bother with the inflexibility of regular lines of reporting (clueless helpdesk people.)

The system was slated to die, to be replaced by a "proprietary" chat network, which makes me sad. I've never seen anything so eminently usable for technical work in a large organization.

Jabber?

[Max Romantschuk]

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

It's too bad that the Jabber project has been largely dismissed as a chat-thingy, when it could solve real problems in a workplace.

Say you're spellchecking a document at work, and your wordprocessor doesn't recognize a deparment name. Your word processor could use Jabber to check other word processors in your organization if they know of the word in question.

I recently read Peer-to-Peer - Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies. An excellent book, containing, among other things, a chapter on Jabber.

Re:Jabber?

[Rich]

One of the problems with Jabber is that it isn't really a very good protocol. The fact that it doesn't close the outer tags until the end of a session makes it impossible to implement efficiently using the standard XML tools (the memory requirements are ridiculous).

If you want to make a standard XML format for chat, then first thing to do is look at where Jabber went wrong and start again.

Re:Jabber?

[Jerf]

Not really true, it just a teensy-weensy bit of cleverness... assuming you're talking about DOM and not SAX (which requires no cleverness at all and has no significant memory impact), instead of feeding the entire document to your DOM library, feed each chunk to the DOM library. If you're brave there's some very simple string search heuristics that you can use that for all intents and purposes are 100% effective on a Jabber stream, even though in theory they could go wrong.

Been here, done this, have the code to prove it.

Re:Jabber?

[Jerf]

The problem is not the protocol, the problem is XML's insistence on "one XML document per stream" being a rock-hard rule. I consider a mistake but Tim Bray says it's an advantage in just this situation.

If you could have more then one root element then your DOM library would already support multiple documents coming in as discrete chunks.

There's really no way in an XML protocol around this; dispense with the element at the beginning and you can no longer think of the Jabber communication as a single XML document. Now you've got other problems.

Of course you can now say "Well Jabber shouldn't be XML then" (though I don't know that you personally would), but of course Jabber is XML for other reasons, reasons I consider very good ones. (Few people have truly taken advantage of these reasons but I'm working on it; part of the problem is that I'm first having to build an innovative way to parse XML because neither DOM nor SAX paradigms work; but again, that's a weakness of the XML libraries, not Jabber!)

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

[realfake]

I work for a medium-sized content website; IM has become pretty deeply ingrained in the way people communicate around here. One good example: we use it to coordinate making new areas of the site live; the content people can sit at their own desks and launch content using our CMS, we can sit at our own desks to move code from the development server to the live server. And we QA as we go (we don't have a formal QA team). I can't imagine being able to coordinate this process so well in any other medium.

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

[chipster]

I thought the same thing at first...but it actually does lots of good.

Our CIO made a certain IM client standard throughout the company, and all tech folks are *required* to have an IM account.

We find ourselves using it more often than not. For example, our HQ is in CA, and our Data Center is in MN. Instant messenging comes in handy while working on remote projects, troubleshooting, etc. We have a *ton* of remote offices with folks in them.

I don't know about you, but I am not much of a "phone person", and I find IM to be somewhat of a "happy medium" between phone and email.

It doesn't mention 'lack of standards'

[ishmalius]

Does the submitter not read the article, either? The abstract says:

The first, written by two Sun Labs researchers, looks at the lack of standards in IM protocols, (...etc...)

...yet the very first sentence of the article says:

The recent rise in popularity of IM (instant messaging) has driven the development of platforms and the emergence of standards to support IM.

I think there is a disconnect here.

Artificially Intelligent Messenger

[donnyspi]

For my senior project in school I modified an IM client written in VB6 to have AI capabilities. It can act as a desktop secretary who gets to know new people that IM you when you're away. It takes notes, keeps contact info on file, and can define words. Check it out here.

Where I work, IM is mandatory

[marcsiry]

I work for a large provider of internet services- in fact, we make one of the most popular IM clients in use today.

Here, not being logged into IM is tantamount to not being at work at all. You're expected to be available for chat at any time you're at your desk and don't have an 'away' message up. If you can't manage 5-10 simultaneous IM conversations at once, you'd have a hard time keeping up here.

As other posters have said, it's conveniently situated between e-mail and phone- asynchronous, yet instant. Additionally, it is useful for things like large file transfers and for slinging URLs during conference calls... it makes a great collaborative tool.

The one interesting, yet mildly annoying, thing about it is the office language that has evolved around IM. The 'burstable' nature of the messaging has caused people to adopt SMS-like abbreviations for common phrases:

yt? : "You there?" used to ping people to see if they are actually available for chat. This bugs me; I personally just start the message with useful info and wait to see if I get a reply.
otp: "On the phone" - used to explain your distraction or delay in getting back to a "yt?" ping.
ygm: "You've got mail"- notify someone on IM that you've sent them an e-mail (seems redundant but it's easy to miss an e-mail notification with all the IMs flying around).

Finally, a really useful aspect is the ability to cut across multiple levels of corporate hierarchy with a flick of the "enter" key. One of the senior folks in my company stays logged in all day- his screen name is his last name (as is the case with most people here who eschew 'cutesy' screen names). I've only pinged him once or twice- sending URLs for review and the like- but it's nice to know that I can access top folk directly, and not have my e-mail screened and/or deleted by an admin assistant. Of course, if I'm not careful with how I use that access, that IM could lead to IU (instant unemployment...)

with or without employees' knowledge?

[X_Bones]

I didn't see it mentioned in the second paper, but did the AT&T employees know their IM usage was being monitored? I think that would have a pretty big effect on the study if the subjects knew about it, like artificially lowering the number and length of personal conversations recorded.

But on the other hand, I'd certainly want to know if someone was spying on my personal communications (in a manner not related to any usual workplace monitoring).

Re:how was this legal? rights & liabilities

[G4from128k]

how is it legal to monitor IM sessions without the other parties consent?

Companies have the right to monitor all IM, e-mail, files on their premises. This is more than just an issue of "their house, their rules." If some employee is using IM/email to perpetrate a crime (e.g. sexual harassment, fraud, etc.), the company can be held liable for not doing something about it. Thus, at some level, companies have an obligation to monitor all IM, e-mail, files on their premises. If some companies choose not monitor, then it is because they are very trusting, foolish, or corrupt.

Workflow

[Anonymous Coward]

I wrote a secure IM solution, and my observation is that people generally use it for workflow, albeit informally. "XX is on the phone", "Could you drop by for a minute", "Let me know when you're out of XX application", "What are you doing for lunch?"....Those are the types of things I've observed. People no longer really use email once they have a decent IM solution that's not AOL or Microsoft. The way I look at it, AOL would never use MSN, Microsoft would never use AOL, so why would anyone use either.

IM is a great tool

[knightrdr]

Some people will invariably use IM for personal use. So what? We use it a lot to communicate between departments within IT. I would be more worried about people running Kazaa. :) Here at Novartis, it is nice because we're always multitasking. If I need to contact somebody who is on the phone, I can usually IM them and get a faster answer. Speed is critical when angry people are waiting for an answer.

News organizational use

[mhollis]

Where I work, we have used a program (which started out running on dumb terminals connected to a DEC minicomputer) for many years to keep apprised of the newswires (AP, Reuters, TASS, etc), write and edit news stories and prepare a rundown for a news program. The IM equivilant on this program is the "Top Screen" which will allow you to determine whether or not the person you are trying to message is logged onto the server and will store and forward the message when the person does log on. You are able to store and save messages and conversations. This was always a better idea for short messages than e-mail, especially for group collaboration on a story. In a large organization, it's really nice to be able to message a correspondant or producer in the London Bureau or in Baghdad to get the general gist of a story as it develops. Presently the program is owned by Avid and our version is called iNews (Sorry, Apple). The company I work for presently has rolled out an internal "chat" client that is supposed to allow us to universally chat throughout the company. None of the news people use it, preferring the "top screen" within iNews (which everyone working in news tends to have open anyway). This makes for further segregation between upper level management and those of us who actually produce the content that makes us money. So I would add that, within a corporation, certain clients and standards for instant messaging become part of the corporate behaviors. I should suggest that further study along these lines might be in order.

IM is useful for those who can't verball speak...

[antdude]

I have speech and hearing impediments (can't talk clearly and speak clearly). IM is used OFTEN with coworkers, friends, strangers, etc. It is very difficult and annoying to use someone else to speak and hear for me in person and over telephone. I think without IM, I wouldn't have a job.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

It's interesting that IM is finally getting the attention it deserves in the corporate world.

I wrote a research paper last year examining the basic issues of IM in the workplace.

Big takeaway: Managers and employees have profoundly different interpretations of how/why IM should be implemented at work. If you want, read the paper here.