My dad refuses to use IM, says it's a hassle. "Just email me" he says "I am not tethered to my PC like you ya know!".
Some of us use Instant Messaging and Email everyday, nearly always in contact and never far from a PC. There are many who shy away from IM because it's too instant. They are busy during the day and do not have much time for impromptu conversations on a PC and you can forget about them using IM on a wireless device. The have learned email and that frankly that is working just fine for them.
I am getting this not just from my aging retired parents but also professionals I know in the industry. They are busy! No time for IM conversations and they want to be able to track the conversations they have without a great deal of trouble.
Dad said he would probably use it more if they could pick up the IM messages he missed in the same Inbox as his email and when it's convenient for him, via online web mail or in Outlook on his laptop.
I wanted to suggest a work-around but when I started thinking about this I could not for the life of me come up with an easy solution that would work for him. I don't know of any hosted services out there nor are there any plug-ins for the likes of MS Outlook that allow for shared IM and Mail message retrieval. My Dad uses Outlook and I read somewhere that there are 400 Million Outlook users out there today. There are hundreds of millions of users on various IM clients. Why can't we retrieve offline or online IM messages (regardless of his IM client) in Outlook?
Yes, MSN Messenger has "pager mode" but it doesn't work when the user is offline. There are often times when I forget (sometimes for days) to log into the current 5 IM clients I run and I end up missing conversations and sometimes opportunities. Those messages should come through to my email and also be stored on a central server if I so choose, although web mail would be fine for this. Attachments could be sent via IM and end up in your email inbox, there are some security concerns here.
In the mobile world this makes even more sense, who has time to deal with IM on a mobile device? BlackBerries are popular with the business crowd because they can get their email just about anywhere and when it's convenient for them. If you want to communicate with those people it had better be email, and many of them have IM.
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- Windows Live Messenger (now in beta) has offline messaging which works right now, sending even to older versions of messenger.
- For MSN Messenger 7 or 7.5, you can install Messenger Plus (an addon) that lets you queue offline msgs which get delivered when both parties are online.
- You can configure MSN Messenger's mobile settings to a fake mobile number which will be a standard email address. Don't recall the exact procedure but at the screen it asks you who is your provider select Other then put some email address. All offline/"mobile" msgs will be delivered to email.
- Your dad can do what I do - when I'm busy I simply don't answer IM's, or I talk for 3 minutes and then inform them I got a call/request from someone and "catch ya later".
- I don't answer my cell/phone if I'm busy either, but call back after a few mins.
Thanks for the heads up on Messenger, I will check it out.
I was thinking that since Meebo just raised 3.5M and with Meetro lurking in the weeds they could both use IM to Email/SMS forwarding as a feature. Making it easier for their federated users to get offline messages. I wonder if the new Skype API would allow for this?
I don't use IM, at all. While I was one of the engineers at PlayNet that designed what later became AOL (after porting to the PC from the C64), and designed what we called at the time "On Line Messages" (OLM), I don't use it, and never have.
Maybe it's ok for marketing and such types who don't have to juggle huge amounts of state in their head to work, but every interruption costs a knowledge worker time before they're fully productive again (circa 5-20 minutes, depending). Read the classic book be DeMarco and Lister:
"Peopleware" for some great examples and (unusually) actual hard data. At the time, they were referring to phone calls and people poking their heads in, but it applies equally well to IM.
As you mentioned, you also generally can't archive/search IM either.
I keep records of all my work email forever. IM would be far more painful, even if it is archivable.
And even though I've been in industry for ~22 years, I can still talk faster than I can type - so if it is important enough to interrupt me, why shouldn't it be done by phone? Or Videophone?
Seriously - one reason (definitely not the only one) that IM is/was popular is that it was "free" compared to long-distance calls. It does have the added advantage of knowing when your buddies are online - though that has far less significance now than it did originally, when everyone was on dialup.
The interruption factor is obviously less when I'm randomly browsing, but still - why is it better than a call (IP or otherwise)?
That's not to say it's useless, or that some people and/or groups/generations don't use it constantly - but that also doesn't mean that it's a good thing per se, especially as a work communication tool.
Especially now with IP, flat-rate or virtually-so phone/cell service.
I certainly undertand your position Randell, there are times when I just turn off all IM so I can get some work done. With hundreds of millions using IM and many more using email, there should be a better way to manage both forms of communication. I am sure Meebo (valley IM start-up recently the recipient of $3.5M) could add a feature that allowed IM users to forward all inbound messages to the user's email account of choice, at least then us tech-heads would never miss a message as most of us have Blackberries or alike.
Actually, I wasn't (really) suggesting Email as the alternative to IM (though you can use it as such).
IM shares with phone calls an assumed interactivity and immediacy. "Hey! Whatcha doing? We're leaving for lunch in 2 minutes." doesn't work well translated into email. Voice and/or video calls cover the same requirements that IM does, modulo a few things such as pre-message "presence" (though I dislike it), file transfer (no reason that has to be tied to IM though), etc. They also cover the same space as SMS and the like - SMS is a real hack around lack of bandwidth and to avoid disrupting the business models built around charging significant amounts for voice calls per minute.
Socially and psychologically, it's currently less disruptive to ignore IM/etc than it is to ignore voice calls, though there's no real fundamental reason for that. "Presence" for voice would do away with this argument (it kindof exists today, but doesn't get used much or it's painful to use for UI reasons ("Do Not Disturb"/"Away"/etc settings in PBX's/etc).
If you have bandwidth, why would you tap out weird SMS shorthand into 100-ish character lines instead of simply talking? Ditto for IM, though I can type a lot faster/longer on a keyboard than an cellphone - but I can still talk faster, and provide far more nuance and side information, doubly so if I can leave a video message.
I think in many ways IM is an artifact of the path technology took to get to where we mostly are today, and soon will really be.
There are groups of communication types:
1. Immediate
a) interactive
i) personal (calls, IM)
ii) group (chat, conference)
b) non-interactive (messages - doesn't really belong here)
2. Non-immediate
a) personal
i) crafted, deliberative (email)
ii) spontaneous (messages, quicky-emails)
b) group
i) crafted (forums)
ii) spontaneous (?)
Calls and IM fall into the same grouping by my take. The biggest reason I can see right now for IM in the long-run is pseudo-anonymity - if the government allows it... 1/2 :-) (And there are ways to have pseudo-anonymity without IM.)
And blackberries? For email? Ugh. It's like browsing the web with a WAP browser. Yeah, you can do it, but why would you want to unless forced? :-)
I need IM mail instead of CRAPPY YAHOO!!!!!
From,
alexmeskanick
hey
Google's gmail services allows tracking of IM conversations in the gmail inbox. The IM client is a bit basic, but it works well enough. Plus there is a tray notifier available for Windows, and Mac now I think. Not sure about linux.
Scott
im just ready to get on this im right now because long friends from far away so now we can chat to each other
pls i can not log in to im yahoo.,