chat

Ryan tried to tell me about it a month ago, Jessamyn gets the idea but uses Facebook instead, DeWitt fell for it, Ross said it tipped the tuna, and now I’m finally checking Twitter out. I signed up yesterday and immediately went looking for ways to connect Twitter, Plazes, and iChat.

Tweet is an AppleScript that works with Quicksilver (a launcher) and Twitterrific (a desktop Twitter client) to make updating even easier. Matt Matteson updated it to set iChat status, and Ruben Broman added Plazes integration.

What’s it good for? Think of it like a snack-sized micro mini blog if you want. Or think of it like chatting with your 500 (or 5 million) closest friends. Or think of it as another way of extending personal presence in the electronic age, little bits of information that exist in the environment.

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?

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.