Jenny Levine: Chat/IM

Today we took the kids to see Big Fat Liar. It was totally excellent and everyone loved it, including us adults. If you have kids of any age, two thumbs up. At the beginning of the movie, Frankie Muniz's 14-year old character is late for school, so he has to climb in through a window. He needs someone to distract the teacher though, so he uses his Cybiko to contact his friend Kaylee on her Cybiko and asks her to do it. I nearly did a Danny Thomas spit take.

In visiting the Cybiko site for the first time in a while (I still need to get to the store and look at the new "Xtreme" version), I noticed that it now comes with a WAP browser and they've got the MP3 player live.

Mobile IM: It's a Revolution

"Wireless Village, the initiative sponsored by Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia, and over 100 other Supporters, has issued version 1.0 of the Wireless Village specifications, which aim to enable interoperability of mobile instant messaging and presence services (IMPS). If sucessful, the initiative could force major present Instant Messaging giants such as Microsoft and AOL to open up their systems as the number of potential mobile IM users is likely to outgrow that of current and potential stationary IM users by far." [at InfoSync]

It takes a village to raise IM interoperability. (Sorry, I just couldn't resist.) Note though, how much faster this is moving towards a standard than eBooks are.

Drat. I thought the new version of Trillian would let it reconnect to AIM, but it doesn't. Now I have to keep both Trillian and AIM open. Thanks a lot, hypocritical AOL.

Mobile Messaging Spec Released "An initiative by industry leaders to standardize mobile instant messaging and presence services came to fruition Wednesday with the release of the Wireless Village 1.0 specification.... The goal of the specification is to promote interoperability between mobile and fixed-network instant messaging systems so that, for instance, PC users can exchange messages with mobile phone users.... The specification also is forward-looking and will embrace Multimedia Messaging Services (MMS) when it becomes available, according to the group. MMS will add various multimedia elements, such as music and video, to messaging." [allNetDevices Wireless News]

Great! Now I will be able to send people pictures of Rosie, the cutest puppy in the whole wide world, on their phones! And Bruce will be able to send me pictures of Beans no matter where I am. :-)

Back in the real world, this means you might be able to answer more complex reference questions over IM.

Assigning Metatags to Chat Logs "Another late-night idea: assigning metatags to online conversations, more specific - to chat logs. How many valuable information will be lost, when people chatting online. A good tip for travelling, a valuable URL, anything. Yep, there are client-side solutions to this - a IM logs, URL collectors etc. But I was thinking to do it server-side." [drop.org - community plumbing]

Now there's someone that's thinking ahead. I use AIM to ask Rich quick questions about Oracle and PL/SQL (I'm sure he doesn't think they're "quick"), and I end up just saving the logs as "rich1," rich2," "rich3," etc. I think there was one time when the conversation was contained to one topic so I could name it "portal dynamic pages" or some such thing. But as John Robb has noted, IM sessions need to be integrated into a KM system, and meta tags would certainly help with retrieval from that system.

Question for you: what do you call it when you contact someone via IM? For some reason, it doesn't seem right to me to say I'm "calling" them. I don't feel comfortable using "IM" as a verb, and "chatting" doesn't convey initiating the conversation. Will this take on the language of one of the big players? For example, "xerox" became synonymous with photocopying, so would I "AIM" you to initiate an IM session? What term do you use or would you propose?

ActiveBuddy lets companies control bots "The program highlights the company's aggressive efforts to expand the capabilities of instant messaging, which is slowly evolving from offering informal personal chats to supporting applications such as file-sharing and videoconferencing, as well as multiplayer games. ActiveBuddy has been working to make its technology the de facto standard for creating interactive agents. For instance, someone could ask a bot when a movie is playing in a certain neighborhood and receive a short response that lists show times. The company said it hopes to see bots sitting on most IM users' buddy lists within the next year or so." [at News.com]

If you haven't played with SmarterChild (ActiveBuddy's first demo bot), you should. It's interesting, if for no other reason than to show how great librarians are. I'll bet you'll be surprised at some of the things it can do for you.

Still, I can foresee possible uses for this. Library hours, answers to questions in your local ready reference file, registration for programs, maybe even integration with the OPAC to let you know when your ILL request is in. What if one way to search the OPAC would be via IM on your cell phone? Maybe this could be the automated "Wal-Mart greeter" and the second-level of questions goes to a human being. Just thinking out loud here....

Hey, Paul - you want control, eh? Maybe this could get interesting with some grant money. Want to come out and play?

IM is here. RU prepared? "Since this is the point in most articles where the writer whips out a statistic from an analyst firm to convince you that you ought to continue reading because this is serious stuff, I should let you know that Gartner predicts that by 2005, IM will be used more often than e-mail.... Users of instant messaging software can create their own circumscribed universe of friends and colleagues; Patrick calls it 'your current circle of knowledge partners.' " [via Tomalak's Realm]

<Dr. Pepper>
I'm a knowledge partner,
he's a knowledge partner,
she's a knowledge partner,
we're a knowledge partner,
wouldn't you like to be a knowledge partner, too?
</Dr. Pepper>

What will they think of next? Is there anything that can't be Googled? Go on, I dare you. Send me a Google Instant Message. [in BurningBird]

The I in K-Logs "Collaboration tools should provide content (raw fodder) that I can use in my K-Log. Right now, it's possible to forward e-mails to my desktop K-Log tool. A developer is working right now on sucking in IM conversations.... [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

That would be fantastic if I could save my IM chats with Rich in my k-log! Then Kate could have access to our chats about Oracle and PL/SQL, too.

14333 » January 31 6:51 AM. "AOL has been actively blocking Trillian users. If you switched over to Trillian and use AIM you've had problems connecting all week. As of this morning, version 0.721 is working but will likely be blocked again. AOL is claiming it as a "security" issue." [MetaFilter]

I've been lucky for some reason and haven't had any problems with Trillian accessing AIM, but I have one thing to say to AOL: HYPOCRITES!

Through the Looking Glass "A couple of interesting things came out of my student's focus groups last night.... I'm still trying to sort out some of the things I overheard, but here were some of my big takeaways: IM [Instant Messaging] is bigger than we can possibly imagine - I've heard that IM is huge among teens, but it's bigger than anyone can imagine. I'm still trying to connect the dots on this one.... I can think of a lot of companies who would have sold their soul to be a fly on the wall during these focus groups. Everything from PDAs, to cartoons, to TV, to music, to theatre, to web usability, to wrestling came up." [in Saltire]

I'll bet libraries weren't mentioned once.