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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?
how is it legal to monitor IM sessions without
the other parties consent?
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
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.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
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
Careful messaging the cute intern with stuff like that .. he might sue for sexual harassment.
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.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
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.
.: Max Romantschuk
Were the participants informed that their conversations were to be monitored during this period? from study 2
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.
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.
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.
Business related IMs, eh? I don't think I've ever seen such a thing.
;)
Judging from the IM conversations I've had with most people outside of the geek world I think it would go something like this:
SexyJester2939: hey
kewlPanda52: hi
SexyJester2939: r u doing teh TPS report #s
kewlPanda52: what r u talking abut? those arent due til fri
SexyJester2939: THE #S 4 UR TEAM DOCS!!!!! TODAYY!!!!!!
kewlPanda52: o i c
kewlPanda52: ya I have the #s 4 that
kewlPanda52: just a sex
kewlPanda52: i mean sec lol
SexyJester2939: k
SexyJester2939: lol
kewlPanda52: ok i mail them 2 u
SexyJester2939: thx
kewlPanda52: latez!
SexyJester2939: cu l8r
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...)
Marc Siry || interactive media professional, motorcycle enthusiast ||
I'm hard-pressed to come up with any non-personal uses for IM in the workplace.
.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.
Round here, we often use IM as a means to communicate hard-to-say items while on the phone - shell commands, lines from
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.
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.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
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.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.