Using Instant Message and Chat Software at Gizmos, Inc: Toolkit: PC Workshop

We have email. I have my computer and my Internet service provider has one. You have your computer and your ISP has one. I send email to my ISP, who sends it to your ISP, who will keep it in your mailbox until you download it to your machine.

my computer

my
ISP's computer

the Internet

your
ISP's computer

your computer

Never mind that we can live next door to each other in St. Louis. I use NetZero in California and you use AOL, in Virginia. The email, in little packets, makes two cross-country trips which themselves zigzag through the Internet.

If we're both online at the same time and we're firing emails back and forth, we realize that even two round trips don't take long at all.

So in 1996, some genius said, "Let's take out one of the ISP computers in the middle."

As long as we're both online at the same time, we need only one, yours, mine, or a third-party's. If we have a third-party computer, then it can keep track of who's online. We can talk to each other directly. Gee, while we're at it, why limit it to one-on-one? Why not let a couple more people sign on to the same computer and everyone can talk to everyone?

my computer

the Internet

the chat computer

the Internet

your computer

Thus was born chat or instant messaging in Israel with a company called Mirabilis. The founders wrote a new protocol to to keep track of who's online and everyone's comings and goings. They called it ICQ ("I Seek You").

Now bits are not atoms. To the computers on either end and the ICQ chat computer in between, it's all a string of ones and zeros. You can type, like email. Why not send images or voices or videos? If I'm a broker on IM with my client, why can't I stream stock quotes? Well, why not? No problem, said the geeks. Bits are bits. Learn more about how this stuff works, the step-by-step workings of the chat process.

I have some music on this CD in digital bits. The central chat computer has determined that we're both online and told us where to find each other. Instead of loaning you the CD, why not just send along the ones and zeros through our chat connection?

"Whoa," say the corporate lawyers. "BIG PROBLEM!!! You still have the CD and your friend has the music?"

"Sure," you say. "Just like text. I write it. It's on my computer. I send it. It's on both computers."

"Ah ha!" say the lawyers. "With IM, just like Napster and Aimster, may they rest in peace, there's a central computer keeping track of everything. I can stop you there."

And it looks as though they will. Meanwhile, chat and IM are office hours, customer service, a sales showroom, an audition. Add some live video and we're living in a science fiction novel. Now it gets fun.

So this genius, Ian Clarke, says, "Let's take out the computer in the middle."

Let's let your computer and my computer find each other. I'm online, you're online, and we can send anything we want directly, no email, no central computers. Clarke calls it FreeNet - rewiring the Internet. Don't miss the video of Ian Clarke's talk at Stanford a couple of years ago.

"No way," says the lawyer. "I won't be able to stop you. You shouldn't be allowed to be out of my control!!"

Guess what? They started out as chat rooms, which got to sounding a little seedy, like a street corner notorious for pick-ups. We're fixing to solve that problem and just talk to each other directly. Share music files with a million of our closest friends on KaZaA. It's often noted that the Internet routes around damage. Copyright lawyers and their clients are damage.

You can make a case that it's illegal and immoral. So is life. What life is not, what the Internet is not, is a sanitized shopping mall.

I don't mean to pick on the lawyers here. They represent their clients, the corporations that own the rights to distribute copies of interesting stuff like music and movies. The corporation's officers can get fired if they don't do everything to stave off the competition. And peer-to-peer networks are the competition. The customer is becoming the competition. So sue your customers. Now there's a revenue model.

A hundred years ago, the hot new technologies, the music and movie industries, violated the copyright laws aplenty. Walt Disney's first claim to cartoon fame, Steamboat Willie, was freely and openly derived from a recent Buster Keaton movie. Walt went on to use tales from the Brothers Grim without paying royalties to anyone. As the Wikipedia points out:

The film has been close to entering the public domain several times; each time, copyright protection in the United States has been extended.

What's different now is that the barriers to entry are so low that everyone with a computer and an Internet connection is potential competition, a publisher and distributor of an exact digital copy.

In short, chat and now peer-to-peer freenets are taking venerable industries and blowing them to bits. This is not new. Since the sail replaced the rowers, disruptive technologies have been wreaking creative destruction on old ways of making money.

I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she's too young to have logged on yet. Here's what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say 'Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?'
--Mike Godwin, Electronic Frontier Foundation

A new survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project finds that instant messaging is especially popular among younger adults and technology enthusiasts. 62% of Gen Y Americans (ages 18-27) report using IM, and 46% report using IM more frequently than email. ...

"Younger Americans, in particular, have incorporated IM into their lives in multiple ways, using it to keep track of their friends, coordinate work meetings, and share files. IM use at home and in the workplace will grow as these creative and time-saving uses of the technology percolate through the generations."

Skills

Why do I call chat or IM synchronous messages? Because we exchange them at the same time. For asynchronous messages, like email, we use different software, different protocols.

Tools

If you have teenagers, you probably already know that instant messaging is taking the their world by storm. As IM becomes available on hand-held and embedded devices, it will become even more popular in this country as it already is in Europe and Japan.

Unfortunately, the half-dozen major software products are not compatible. Although ICQ is very popular, it's pretty geeky. Most web sites that feature chat, for example TalkCity and Yahoo, have their own clients as either a webtop service or browser plug-in. Jabber is an open-source alternative.

One of the most powerful things about the Web is that it increased the value of all content by unifying the technologies surrounding content creation and delivery. In the same way, the disparate conversations happening on the Web today stand to benefit from the introduction of a common messaging platform that's capable of natively supporting the rich context, flexible structure, and rapid knowledge-exchange of human conversations.

The makers of all the IM software except AOL have recently joined in a standards effort, so you can IM almost everyone by using either Microsoft''s MSN or AOL's Instant Messenger (AIM). If you have an AOL account, you already have AIM. If you download the full Explorer and Communicator packages above, you will probably get both of them again. Please note that you don't need an AOL account to use AIM.

Until the Jabber philosophy prevails, or until a government steps in, AOL seems to be the winner here. They have instant messaging -- one-on-one and chat rooms -- built into their software. That same software is available for download whether or not you have an AOL account. I recommend it. Here's another:

Connect to ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and IRC in a single, sleek and slim interface.

Trillian .74 is completely free, with no use limits, no spyware and no ads.

MSN (Microsoft Network) has voice and the ease of opening the NetMeeting software.

A step up from IM is meeting software, such as NetMeeting, that adds voice, video, and shared whiteboards and other software applications like spreadsheets.

C ahoots (now Informative) - chat, either text or voice, public or private, with someone else who
has the same software:

meet people visiting the same Website as you and join a group text or voice conference there

hold Web tours

assist customers in real time

Instant messaging gets a digital media overhaul, as Yahoo integrates streaming music, cartoon backgrounds and games into its new application. But America Online and Microsoft still rule.

You'll never use ordinary text-based chat again. Pick a "persona" from the extensive library, set it as your profile, and start chatting. For MSN only.

Learn more

A camper is someone who logs on to a company's instant messaging (IM) application and just won't log off. He sits online, messaging people as they come and go, begging attention -- and becomes a distraction.

Watch out browsers, bots, e-mail and telephones--here comes the next generation of instant messaging.

Jabber is developing a voice to text translation service with speech recognition company Nuance. Check out their demos.

Omni combines AIM, ICQ, MSN Explorer and Yahoo! Messenger, plus the file-download utilities, all in one.

In a few weeks, a new "buddy" (ActiveBuddy) will appear on instant messaging lists that could substantially change the way information is distributed and retrieved on the Net.

Instant Messenger (IM) is a huge corporate tool, yet it rarely mentioned in corporate productivity or learning plans. In fact, most IM usage is not corporately provided or managed, but rather an informal system created by users, self-installing software for AOL, Yahoo or Microsoft systems.

A recent study by Jupiter Media Metrix breaks out IM-user estimates into home and work categories, and in a study of IM at work released in November, it found 8.8 million AOL IM users, 4.8 million MSN Messenger users, and 3.4 million Yahoo! Messenger users. Even more impressive is that the total IM usage in the office more than doubled over the past year, from 2.3 billion minutes in September 2000 to an astounding 4.9 billion minutes in September 2001.

PC Magazine carried a recent story about IM at work and indicated that, �indeed, so many workers now run IM windows on their PCs during the workday that corporate IT managers are getting worried about both the use of bandwidth for IM chatting and the security issues inherent in IM. There are worries about the way IM provides a hole in the security wall erected by corporate firewalls, about employees' indiscretion in what they say and to whom over IM, and about client privacy issues. In health-care and securities firms, for example, there are federal laws about privacy and confidentiality, and casual discussion in IM windows about patient matters or trading in securities can violate those laws�.

The MASIE Center has seen a dramatic rise in the use of IM in e-Learning programs, to connect learners to each other and to provide easier access to instructors. On a personal level, I use IM at work, instead of email for about 80% of my �e� messages to my staff and to core colleagues. Prior to calling my colleague, Wayne Hodgins at Autodesk, I will always check to see if he is available and about 75% of the time, we just use IM to carry on our dialogues, often stretched out while we multi-task on other items.

One of the powerful aspects of IM is that it is �permission based� collaboration, limited to those people that I authorize for access to me as a �buddy�. Leveraging and scaling that in a corporate situation has a number of challenges that organizations are just starting to discover and tackle.

It would be a good time to both survey your workforce to measure the extent of IM usage and to consider developing a policy to get the best use of Instant Messenger. Here are some issues that you might consider:

* Choosing an official IM system for your company, that links into other enterprise software.
* Develop a strategy for how your organization would most appropriately
use IM and what are approved and non-approved uses.
* Add IM usage tips to employee orientation and training
* Provide an IM model for extending e-Learning and e-Coaching
* Evaluate the impact of IM on collaboration and distraction in the workplace.





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Workbench web design applications	Kiln digital development process	Toolkit digital technology guide


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modified: October 24, 2001 by Douglas Anderson http://RicciStreet.net/gizmos/toolkit/collaboration/im.htm

Instant Message / Chat

The PC Workshop

Let's take out the computers in the middle!

my
ISP's computer

your
ISP's computer

the chat computer

Skills

Tools

Learn more

Instant Message / Chat

The PC Workshop

Let's take out the computers in the middle!

my ISP's computer

your ISP's computer

the chat computer

Skills

Tools

Learn more

my
ISP's computer

your
ISP's computer