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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.""
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
It allows people to talk to each other without turning away from their screens, increasing productivity!
Security-wise, you'd have IM only allowed internally (all external connection attempts blocked) on a work-supllied version of whatever you're using.
Been heavily involved in a huge IT project. It ran purely on IM.
IM is just invaluable when you deal with dozens or hundreds of people in a handful of time zones, many of them travelling around, often no phones around... there's nothing as useful as dropping a message and get near instant return on your question.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
If you don't like it, don't use it... and you don't. So why complain to slashdot about it?
IM is more interactive than e-mail, but not as resource demanding as using a phone. I mean, I can talk to someone on a phone and work if I'm talking about what I'm working on. But if I'm talking to my wife, the keyboard stops.
Now with IM, I can go back and forth quite easily and smoothly. If I am chatting with my wife on IM, the keyboard doesn't have to stop. If I don't reply in a minute or two, people get the idea that I'm busy.
With e-mail, if I don't reply in a minute or two, that doesn't mean squat. The message might be delayed, I might have closed my e-mail client, or any number of things. People don't expect a prompt repsonse from an e-mail.
If you think IM is somehow distracting, how can you handle a telephone ring?