Slashdot Mirror
Instant Messaging Goes Graphical
williampiv writes "For most of the millions of people around the world who regularly use instant messaging, the communications tool has largely been a text-only experience in which typed emoticons offer only minimal clues to someone's state of mind.
The recent launch of two services -- a brand new, fully three-dimensional chat-room product known as IMVU, and AOL Instant Messenger's new 3-D SuperBuddy icons -- is putting the spotlight on a major shift by the leading IM providers toward making graphical avatars a fundamental personalization feature."
Why is this news?
Banaaaana!
seriously.
A webcam pretty much does the same thing - except you don't have avatars, you ARE the avatar.
From a person that uses Apple, Windows, and LInux on a daily basis, I hope that Apple allows Whatever technology they are building into Tiger for the new IChatAV Teleconferencing, they allow to be ported to other OS's.
I suppose it's fitting that AOL is building the metaverse. In Snow Crash the Street was run by "computer graphics ninja overlords." I think AOL could fit that role.
Only in a Slashdot fantasy can a Slackware install turn into several hours of sex . . . . .
I'm probably just too much of an IRC addict to like the idea.
"[..] It feels a little like a solution in search of a problem. [..]"
Come on, text-based chats are more than enough
for easy real-time communication. If you want
something fancy use a Webcam-chat or video-conferencing instead.
Honestly, not only has this been done before with other chat clients (didn't Microsoft have a failed attempt), but what's the point? Who would actually use this? When I use AIM I specifically disable smilies and such because they're annoying... why would I now want disembodied aliens on my intarweb screen? AIM having those "themed" IM windows in 5.0 was a terrible idea. They just keep adding more crap into their client, kind of how they ruined ICQ.
If you say "here goes my karma" I will bite you!!!
I do remember this, or something called The Palace where people had avatars and could move from rooms to rooms... I don't have much memories from... 8... years ago, but it's enough for this 'new technology' not all so inovative.
The entire thing seems useless to me anyway. The good part of instant messaging is that it's quick and requires little attention. There is no way I'm going to start staring at graphical stuff taking up half my screen while I'm suppoed to work.
Qui ne va pas à la chasse n'a pas de gibier
PHP Queb
I don't understand what companies think we use IM for. Do they think we use it because "t3xt is just s0 c00l" or for graphics?
I use IM to communicate quickly and efficiently with my associates -- nuff said'. If I want a 3D experience with someone, I go to lunch, see them in person, or just in general have a life.
Who wants most of their desktop consumed by some resource intensive 3D application for IM?
Oh this seems cool. But think about it.. whos really gonna have a use of this? I think its a little overkill.. I got enough with normal msn (with amsn ofcourse:) But what do i know hehe..
When my mom and dad were kids, they worked on the farm. (29 hours a day, etc, etc) But they played with nearby kids.
When I was a kid, I mostly played with nearby kids, but my parents drove me to a few friends' houses. (and vice versa)
My kids played with a few neighborhood kids, but mostly we drove them to friends' houses. (and vice versa)
Do you see a trend here?
In the old days, we adapted and adjusted to the people around us. We are progressing toward simply finding people like us, so we don't have to adapt and adjust. The widespread availability of the car was probably a driving factor in this. But even as we are more choosey about our friends, we have to retain the same set of acquaintances, because there are after all the limitations of the physical world.
Now add the Internet. It makes it more possible than ever to withdraw from the real world. To some extent, it even allows you to minimize interactions with real-world acquaintences. Now we can pick our friends AND, to a good extent, our actuaintances. Or at least, the Internet allows us to manipulate our focus more easily, ignoring or bashing those who do not fit our world-view.
I would submit that our interpersonal skills are atrophying as a result, and that one place it becomes evident is the current election cycle. When you pick your friends and acquaintances, it becomes easier to turn the world into "us" and "them," and that seems to be what the world has been about, the past few years.
*****
Virtual Universe? I don't WANT a virtual universe that looks just like the one I'm in. A brisk walk in the real universe at least gives me a little cardiovascular exercise and stimulates my other senses. The only thing that really interests me in the virtual universe would be places I can't go, for reasons of money, time, or accessability, or places that just don't or can't exist.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Instant messaging exists as a communication tool. It is more interactive than e-mail but more convenient and less expensive than the phone. Trying to gussy it up with 3D garbage and requiring you to use the mouse a lot to communicate makes the whole process less efficient and more expensive.
Why not just let me communicate? This is the same reason I don't have games, text messaging, a pepper mill, or a camera in my cell phone - none of these things would make it a more effective tool for verbal communication or an efficient tool for non-verbal.
"she's not sure it is going to be the big hit the IM services want it to be. 'I think it's kind of short-lived....it's one of those faddish things that people are going to want to have for a while" *GROAN*
I know I'm getting old, but come on. This crap has been tried before, and it wasn't a success then, it's not going to succeed now. To be truly revolutionary, you need to either get more immersed in an online world (covered by Everquest, etc), or more graphical with your own face (Covered by web cams, etc). Personally I think the 'next big thing in chatting' is next to impossible to reach because the very things that make it the next big thing, go against what makes chatting work right now. Text. Why not voice. Or vid phone. Or the telephone? Text is great because it allows you to ignore people, allows you time to think about your thoughts before replying. Allows you to be away for a while. Text is also small. Can you imagine trying to run 4 other apps while chatting with someone with those big goofy graphics? Not only that, but how do you manage multiple people? I'm sure some guys are really into 1-on-1 cyber chatting with fake girls, but text allows managing of multiple/random/sporadic/temporary chatters. "So AIM is charging $2 for each SuperBuddy a user buys. The company sees SuperBuddies a little bit like ring tones -- one-off customizations for a communications tool. And AIM hopes its customers won't stop at one SuperBuddy, but that they'll want different ones for different moods." Yea. The dot.com crap just keeps going...
Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?
Just forget the rancid way people behave on IM for a minute... This graphical chat thing is just absolute garbage! ...Google perhaps?
If anyone has been around for a while you may remember back when Instant Messaging was functional and innovative- nowadays it seems development by these big companies has stagnated-- and these are the new features? 3D heads floating in space??
The only cure for IM is to allow interoperability between clients, this would allow for greater competition-- because as it stands now people are stuck with whoever has a monopoly on IM in their country- AIM in most of the U.S. and MSN Messenger everywhere else...
Could someone (or some company) save IM!?
Emoticons and animated "emotions" inherently make people less able to convey their actual emotions. If you just use the best approximation out of a collection of pictures or animations to express yourself, you are limiting yourself much more. With words, you can say something that has never been said before to describe precisely what you're feeling. I don't see pictures doing that. While people who know you closely might be able to make correct inferences about your state of mind based on your use of these icons, the redundancy caused by everyone else in the world using them too makes this difficult for people who don't know you as well. Also, if the animations are actually supposed to be important in the context, the program is demanding a lot more of your attention, which would make many of us more reluctant to use it.
"typed emoticons offer only minimal clues to someone's state of mind."
What happened to using language to explain the state of your mind? Is humanity throwing out the significant advancement of expressing thought with an abstracted language?
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
A 3D environment that suffers for all of the reasons listed above: takes too much attention, learning curve is too steep, bandwidth is too much, still doesn't reflect emotional tides in the conversation. Essentially, it is too cumbersome to be able to add anything to a conversation, and is expensive to implement (either in terms of bandwidth, developing cost, etc) that 3D chat environments aren't widely used.
However, what I think these systems are really trying to do is to add a sense of "belonging" to a virtual space. Instead of chatting in the abstract, without grounding in real-world metaphors, these systems are trying to associate the chat with real-world analogs. Therefore, anything that accomplishes that goal would be a success.
Based on my experience of MUSHing, I have to say that I think the same could be accomplished if the MUSH environment was wedded to a chat protocol. When I MUSHed, I always felt more comfortable chatting in my built environment, even when I was OOC. Why? Chatting in any given place carried the same information. But I had some custom coded objects that I could show off, but more than that I knew the objects that were described and I could much more easily imagine myself sitting and chatting in a place that I knew than trying to picture doing it in a random place.
So instead of going 3D, I think folks like AOL or whoever would do better to develop a chat environment that allowed for descriptions to be viewed and some interactivity with objects. Also for characters to "pose", that is I type ":: glances into his wallet" and YOU see "Johnny Mnemonic glances into his wallet." You can't currently do that with chat systems with which I'm familiar, although you can see that it adds depth to the narrative in a seamless way. That would be enough to simulate presence in a "sitting room" and would allow more complex interaction, although would still have all of the benefits of text-based chat.
The reason that MUSHes lost out to other kinds of gaming is that when gaming one really wants to have a visual experience; but when chatting, one wants to communicate with as much control as possible. When you're chatting, I think people are willing to read; so they might be inclined to read through your descriptions of your "room."
For this to work, you wouldn't want to have to log in to a MUSH server, although I'm surprised that there aren't more just chat MUSH servers (seems like they all want to put you through this chargen thing, whereas I really just want to shoot the breeze.) You would need a client that can interpret the action commands itself and display back the requisite info, so a client and server should be balled up into one; and the syntax would need to be ubiquitous enough that the command actions from my friends could be interpreted by my server reliably. But would that really be that complicated?
--
$tar -xvf
Anyone who thinks it is only possible to have a "minimal" sort of conversation over a textual medium is not sufficiently familiar with the medium. Nearly all languages use arbitrary symbols to convey meaning and connotations, and text-chat is no different. Sure, ":-)" a priori carries only a minimal amount of information, but use of thisand many other, non-emoticonsymbols, in context carries quite a bit more information.
It's probably reasonable to say the the bandwidth of textual communication is lower, and thus the total amount of information transmitted has to be lower, but it's not correct to say that this requires it to be a crude medium with no connotation. When you've been talking to a person or group of people over a textual medium long enough, you start to speak it fluently, and use the arbitrary symbols in a useful manner.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Doing more and more graphical stuff might bring in more kid types into the fold, but would seriously ruin it for the rest of us - specially it is probably going to require more clicks or keystrokes to do the same thing.
An analogy is HTML email. It is great for the junk that my company sends to all its employees - I get to see the company colors(guess that is supposed to make me more loyal) but how many of us attempt to colorize our day to day emails? Should I use ctrl-b to highlight the work - duh?
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