Among the missing features I hear the most complaints about regarding iChat is the lack of tabbed chatting. Today I discovered it’s part of Leopard. Simply go to the iChat prefs, click on the messages pane, and selected “Collect chats into a single window” and you’re set.

Corporate networks are defenseless against the growing threat from instant messaging, and the government warns WiFi is insecure and easily sniffed.

Experts suggest we take precautions against the growing risk of p2p software that’s exposing sensitive documents and threatening national security.

Businesses blame security problems on their employees, their mobile devices, and other consumer technologies.

And now we have MySpace.

Games

Tilt, described in programmer Joe Hewitt’s blog:

…Christopher introduced me to a very talented video game designer, Nicole Lazzaro, who had an endless stream of ideas for games that would use the iPhone’s accelerometer. Nicole’s ideas quickly ran into the limitations of the phone, as we discovered that the browser doesn’t rotate when you hold it vertically upside down, nor is it possible to distinguish the two horizontal orientations. When we realized that her four-sided Tetris idea was not possible, we initially tried to compensate by adding in button pressing and other methods, but decided that we wanted to make a game that was very simple and used only the tilt sensor for input. Nicole’s philosophy is to focus on the emotional ride a player feels while being challenged and rewarded at just the right times, as opposed to just realistic graphics and long monotonous missions. From an engineer’s standpoint, I was overjoyed to focus on the psychological impact of my code instead of trying to build a technical or artistic masterpiece.

Hewitt also developed iUI: “As much as possible, iUI maps common HTML idioms to iPhone interface conventions.”

Meanwhile MacMost and iGiki both offer a number of iPhone optimized games.

Chat

JiveTalk, a web-based AIM/iChat, MSN, Yahoo!, GoogleTalk, ICQ, and Jabber client. The public alpha is online at iphone.beejive.com, though one imagines the company will eventually charge for use (they sell a chat client for Blackberry).

Gear Live offered instructions on how to cobble together IRC access on the iPhone with Colloquy on your Mac (you do use a Mac, don’t you?), the Colloquy web add-on, a bit of configuring, and a visit to http://YourIP:6667 on your iPhone.

I’ll probably tweak some Twitterers by categorizing them under “chat,” but we should at least be happy to see Hahlo and PocketTweets, two apps that make it east to Twitter via iPhone.

Remote Control

Telekinesis and Remote Buddy both make it easy to control your Mac with your iPhone, but Nate True’s WebVNC hack brings remote desktop support to the iPhone (Windows only).

Application Manager

How can we keep track of all these apps (and so many more not mentioned); how can we get to them quickly? AppMarks promises a sweet solution.

iphone, applications, chat, IRC, AIM, IM, games, remote control

With rumors of a March release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, swirling, Zach asked what was promised that he should be excited about, so I went looking to jog my memory.

The announced features include Time Machine automatic backup of all your stuff (with integration to make finding and restoring stuff in applications easy and sweet, watch the video already), as well as a big leap ahead for iChat. The news isn’t that iChat finally supports multiple logins, visibility, or animated icons, or even the fancy backdrops or other goodies in the video chat. No, the big news for iChat is “iChat Theater,” described here in Apple’s developer announcement:

Instant messaging has become an essential tool for users to communicate and collaborate. In Leopard, the ability to collaborate has been taken to a new level. In an iChat session, users will be able to use iChat Theatre to present data from another application, such as iPhoto or Keynote, as part of a video conference. The applications you create will also be able to integrate with iChat in the same way using the Instant Messaging framework via the Core Video and Core Audio APIs. Once integrated, the Instant Messaging framework will automatically compress the content, using the H.264 codec, and send it across the network to the remote user’s display.

From the looks of it, iChat Theater will be compatible with any IM client and network that supports video chat, including AIM.

Hey, note also that first line where they call IM an “essential tool.”

iChat Theater, IM, Leopard, Mac OS Leopard, Mac OS X, Mac OS X 10.5, iChat, instant messaging

They don’t want to engage in chat with their professors in the classroom space, they want to chat with other students in their own space.

— from Eric Gordon’s presentation this morning.

Hey, isn’t that the lesson that smart folks have been offering for a while now: “Nobody cares about you or your site. Really.” How could learning environments not be subject to the same cluetrain forces affecting the rest of the world?

Students love IM. They love Google. They love FaceBook. What does your courseware matter to them?

IM, SSTL2006, academia, academic discourse, chat, nercomp, social software, students

Brian Mann calls Adium “one of the best multi-network [IM] clients ever.” Tim Bray says it has a “wonderful user interface,” while also naming IM generally “an essential business tool.” Eric Meyer, meanwhile, exclaims “Adium is my new chat buddy.”

What’s so great about Adium? Gaim is the engine behind the scenes, but the face of the application is XHTML and CSS. Wit Meyer:

The entirety of an Adium chat window is an XHTML document that’s being dynamically updated via DOM scripting—all of it pumped through WebKit, of course. In creating a message theme, you define what markup will be used, and write CSS to style it. You can even define variants on your theme by writing additional style sheets.

So with all that, how can I not look at it?

GAIM, adium, aim, im, instant messaging

I happened to stumble back onto the Pew Internet Report on teens and technology from July 2005 that report that told us “87% of [US children] between the ages of 12 and 17 are online.” But the part I’d missed before regarded how these teens were using communication technology:

Email, once the cutting edge “killer app,” is losing its privileged place among many teens as they express preferences for instant messaging (IM) and text messaging [SMS] as ways to connect with their friends.

To them, email is increasingly seen as a tool for communicating with “adults” such as teachers, institutions like schools, and as a way to convey lengthy and detailed information to large groups. Meanwhile, IM is used for everyday conversations with multiple friends that range from casual to more serious and private exchanges.

It is also used as a place of personal expression. Through buddy icons or other customization of the look and feel of IM communications, teens can express and differentiate themselves. Other instant messaging tools allow for the posting of personal profiles, or even “away” messages, durable signals posted when a user is away from the computer but wishes to remain connected to their IM network.

Interesting. Connect that with a 2004 Korean study of student’s communication practices that revealed more than two-thirds of the 2,000 respondents “rarely use or don’t use e-mail at all.” Why?

…it’s impossible to tell whether an addressee has received a message right away and replies are not immediately forthcoming. [...] “The new generation hate agonizing and waiting and tend to express their feelings immediately,” said Professor Lee. “The decline of email is a natural outcome reflecting such characteristics of the new generation.”

Interesting. American teens say email is for old people, Korean high-school and college students say it’s too slow, and UNH’s students tells us they chat away an average of 9.3 hours a week in AIM.

aim, aol instant messenger, communication, im, instant messaging, instant messenger, short message service, sms, technology, teens, the death of email, youth

Just when you thought I was done talking about how the internet really does touch everything, Lichen posts some details from the most recent University of New Hampshire Res Life student survey and it gets me going again. In order, the top three activities are:

• socializing (15.8 hours/week)
   
• studying, excluding in-class time (12.5 hours/week)
   
• instant messaging, (9.3 hours/week)

Lichen also points out that IM activity was reported separately from “personal internet use,” which got an additional 8.4 hours/week.

The survey doesn’t appear to be online, so I can’t tell how many other computer-related activities are reported or how activities like “studying” may (or may not) also include computer use.

AIM, campus computing, computer use, IM, instant messenger, online activity, social networking, social software, student life, survey, unh, university of new hampshire, usage survey

I noted Aaron Schmidt’s points on IM in libraries previously, but what I didn’t say then was how certain I was that popular instant messaging clients like AOL Instant Messenger or Yahoo!’s or Google’s are far superior to the so-called virtual reference products. Why? They’re free, our patrons are comfortable with them, and they work (three things that can’t be said about VR products). Ah, heck, just take a look at what Michael Stephens was saying about them last week (as quoted by Teresa Koltzenburg at ALA TechSource):

“Back in 2002, my library jumped into the virtual reference game, and we wrote a gigantic check to an unnamed VR company. We spent the summer doing intensive training. I was training at that time at my library, and I designed a four-session, four-hour-apiece training course to get people comfortable with this huge, scary thing that was virtual reference.”

According to Michael, after the large initial investment made by his library in the VR product, plus probably another $5,000 on the training, and the staff time spent promoting it, his library’s virtual reference service, via the vendor-supplied software, “fell flat on its face.” He explains, “After you pulled your users into this Java-enabled, chat queue, they got the message, something like, ‘Hold on. The library will be right with you.’ Then the whole thing would crash. What kind of message were we sending with that one?”

IM, for SJCPL, was meant to be a temporary VR fix, but as of today, says Michael, “It’s permanent. We cancelled that contract on the unnamed VR product, said ‘good-bye,’ and today we use IM. I can’t tell you enough how great it is.”

Perhaps I like this story because it gives me another chance to bang the drum on my not invented here story, but the point is that none of this need be expensive or complex. And while I’m tempted to suggest you ask the kids in the young adult section about it, the truth is that AIM is larger than that, it’s just another facet of our ballooning internet use.

AIM, aol instant messenger, change, changing modes of communication, communication, communication technology, im, instant messaging, modes of communication, aim, virtual reference, library, libraries, reference desk, reference, future libraries, library 2.0, lib20

There’s a bit of discussion of AIM’s role in personal communications over at Remaining Relevant. I mention it here because I’ve been thinking about this lately.

We’re seeing some great shifts in our modes of communication. Take a look at how “webinar” technologies have changed sales forces. The promise is lower costs and faster response time, but it also challenges our expectations and the skills of the salesperson. Now imagine the generation of kids who are growing up with AIM entering the workforce. Imagine how much more effectively and naturally they’ll be able to communicate remotely (and also imagine how they’ll probably not tolerate today’s mostly one-way “webinars”).

IM will significantly rearrange the communications landscape, even if it may not completely replace any previous mode. My worry is my doubt about my ability to communicate effectively and naturally in the communication mode that is so common to a generation just younger than mine.

aim, im, instant messaging, aol instant messenger, changing modes of communication, modes of communication, change, communication, communication technology

My Treo rocks. Part of my love for the new gadget is how I can now AIM on the run without SMS. Sure, I risk frostbitten fingers as I walk across campus and I’d probably be a lot better off if I just called the person, but…but…

Anyway, Everything Treo was near the top of my Google query with a roundup of three commercial IM apps for Palm. But none of the reviewed apps seemed all that great, and I sort of expected to find a free client. The Treonauts review wasn’t much help either, and I was about to give up when I found Atomig Cog’s Toccer, a completely free, still-in-beta AIM client. It’s plenty capable and seems to be in active development (five releases since mid-August).

A couple features I didn’t think about before I started looking include directly connecting to AOL (some clients use a proxy), background receiving (because fully-synchronus IMing is frustrating), and support for the five-way nav clicker.

palm, treo, IM, AIM, communication, mobile phones, cellphones, instant messaging, AIM client, mobile communications, chat

Aaron Schmidt’s 10 points about IM in libraries include:

1. Instant Messaging is free (minus staff time)
2. Millions of our patrons use IM every day.
3. For some, not being available via IM is like not having a telephone number.
4. There are three major IM networks (AIM, Y!M, MSN)
5. Y!M and MSN will be interoperable at some point.
6. Trillian is a multi-network IM client, meebo is a web-based multi-network client. Use them.
7. Having practice sessions in-house is a good way to get staff excited about IM in libraries.
8. Staff can communicate in-house using IM.
9. Libraries can choose to have one IM point of contact, or they can choose to divide it departmentally.
10. IM is user-centered and builds relationships with library users.

edit: URL fixed as per Aaron’s comment below.

tags: aim, im, im client, im networks, instant messaging, libraries, library, public relations, point of contact, reference, reference services, relationships, telephone, telephone number, trillian