Or: Why the hell aren’t you online so I can talk to you?
Back around 1999 or so, everyone who was anyone (and who had some sort of high-speed internet connection) had AOL instant messenger and ICQ. Furthermore, they had their AIM/ICQ on at all times. It was almost as if people would jump out of bed to chat on the fancy new technology if someone made their computer plonk at 3:00 AM.
Meanwhile, Instant Messaging took most of the world by storm. It was a cheap-as-free way to send someone a quick message, people loved it’s “I may or may not be here” non urgent nature, allowing one to ignore a message if they were busy without the other side being upset (unless of course the other side was angsty, at which point they were always upset).
I was a big AIM kid. I always had the messenger up, especially during college. I marveled at the number of dinner meetings and dates and sorts of things that could be done over IM. I also got accounts for the other upstarts, like MSN messenger and Yahoo messenger, but I didn’t really use them.
By the time GMail introduced GTalk sometime in 2005, my IM usage had drastically changed. Instead of using it all the time when I wasn’t at class or work, I had started to use it pretty much exclusively during work, and starting to hate trying to use it at home. The reason for this: sucky multiclient programs, followed by multiple computers in my house.
At first, when I started making friends who didn’t like AIM for whatever reason (the heathens), I started trying to get semi-useful multi-clients (after, of course, telling people that if they didn’t use a protocol iChat supported I would secretly hate them). The main one that sort of worked was GAIM. A ridiculously functional Open-Source client that, since it was open source, had eye-bleedingly awful user interface design. The start of my problem is that I only liked running GAIM and it’s later cutesy port, pidgen, when I was actually on my linux box so it would fit in.
I would also sometimes use the prettier Apple-ier port of GAIM called Adium, but this runs into my second problem… That I have lots of computers interspersed throughout the house and I spend an equal amount of time on each, and I am often so consumed by randomness in my own house I cannot be bothered to stay on the computer to finish a conversation or be good about even leaving an “oops, gotta run” type message. This is also exacerbated by the fact that the best multi-client I have found so far, a web-based application called Meebo, does not really set you to ‘idle’ all that well.
So, to those of you who I have walked-away from, I apologize. It’s not you, it’s that I walked off to do something and forgot to mention I might not get back to it for a couple of minutes, hours, or days.
Feel free to leave a comment or discuss in the forums.
Tags: IM, sorry I didn't IM back, ubiquity