Don’t worry, I have some stuff for this week that will hopefully go into an update tomorrow.
If you know me at all, you know how much I hate AIM. Not just for people using it improperly but the program itself does not do a lot of things that I would like to have, some of these can be added with an add-on such as middle_man but that is just a hack and not all that stable. I was able to live with these flaws for a while because they were not anything that was absolutely required. Now with a laptop to go along with a desktop and spending time in the Unix lab these flaws make AIM more of a hassle than a help. My goal is to try out the various options available to see which ones meet my most important needs and if any offer something useful that I had not thought of.
The biggest hurdle is that everyone I know uses AIM and nothing else. I’m going to ignore this fact. I need people willing to come along for the ride who will use the same client so that we can see how it compares.
The list for the comparison now is AIM, Yahoo, MSN, and ICQ. I have also been using GAIM for a while now so I will include that and if I see any reason to I will try Trillian. There are not any other major networks but if some smaller ones seem to offer some benefits then I will try them to.
The Dream
In my opinion IM should be like email, but instant. Email is very fast but not nearly instant. The best feature is that you have access to your messages from anywhere that has an internet connection. I’m assuming you are using IMAP or a webmail (PSU’s, Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, etc.), in these cases your email is stored on a server that you can access anywhere instead of downloaded to your main PC and not accessible anywhere else.
In order to do these effectively every message you send and receive would have to be stored on the network’s server. That way when you open up your client from anywhere you will see if you have been sent any new messages and you can look back through old ones. With AIM currently you can be signed on at home, receive a message while you are gone, sign on to AIM in class and have no idea that you have been sent a message. Middle_man offers a way to check if you have received messages but it is not really easy for everyone.
The problem here is storage space and privacy. However it is not any different from the webmail available now in storing message and keeping a lot of information. IMs are only text, images don’t need to be saved on the server. I know that IBM had mentioned a few months back that they wanted to integrate email and IM better, but I don’t see this being something free and widespread. Any of the current offerings could easily do this, since they all offer email. Google is the one to look out for if they decide to get into this business. Being able to store and search through old IMs goes right along with GMail. Plus, their desktop search is able to keep a history of AIM chats that you can search through.
Must Haves
These are the things that I really need to effectively use an IM program. Most of these would be solved with the system above so these will try to deal with things that are or are close to what is available currently.
Offline Messages – This one is simple enough. If someone is not online, you can still send them a message. Next time they sign on, they will receive the message.
This is done in Yahoo and ICQ. MSN pops up an email window, which is handy. AIM does nothing, you can use AIM Offline (if its still up) to emulate this, but that’s a pain.
The drawback is if you sign in quickly somewhere you will get a message that you need to handle at home and will have to jot down a note or email it to yourself.
History – Another simple one. Just keep track of all conversations. I hate closing a window and forgetting what was said and having to ask again.
Yahoo, MSN, ICQ all do this. AIM does not, although I would say that this will be added in the near future. GAIM or an AIM addon can do this. This is top reason why I want to dump AIM.
Problem again is if you are signed on somewhere and the old conversation is stored somewhere else.
Constant Away Message – This one has a different meaning for AIM and everyone else because of how you are allowed to sign on. With AIM you can sign on from multiple places and when you sign off the away message from one of the other sign ons is used. I like this. With the others you are signed off from the original location when you sign on somewhere else. There needs to be an option for an offline away message. When using offline messaging you don’t want to leave an old location signed on until you sign on somewhere else. That would mean you won’t receive the messages sent in that between time. So, when you leave you should sign off, but that’s really more ‘being away’ than signing off since you still can receive messages.
This one needs to work with offline messaging to work effectively. I’m not aware of any clients that do this.
Useful but not necessary
Previous chat in the window – GAIM has a plugin that does this and its very useful. Think about this situation. You ask someone who is away a question, you know they won’t be back for a while so you close the window to save space. Then IM you back later with a yes or no and you have no idea what question you asked. With this feature the previous conversation appears in the chat window, almost like you never closed the window.
As I said GAIM does this nicely, I don’t believe any of the others do, but I hope I’m wrong. This is a really good addition.
The first test starts today, with Yahoo! The reason is offline messages. This is the most useful thing to me right now. I picked this over ICQ because I was using ICQ for a little while last night and it does not ‘feel’ good, I can’t explain that too much more. Also I got spam messages in the few minutes I was on, and that’s never a good thing. ICQ does have the fact that you can chat with AIM users going for it and I used to love it back before AOL bought it, but I don’t think it has a chance.
So let me know if you want to join the Yahoo! test. You can get it here.
[...] Trying some recurring feature ideas that will maybe get some posting started. This one will highlight three programs that I have used recently, enough to get a good feel for them. For this first one I’ve picked three of my most used programs, the only other program I use as much as these is AIM, and we all know how I feel about that. [...]
[...] I can’t believe I wrote my original IM experiment entry on 12/4/04. Since then not enough has changed. If you read that one, I said that Google is the one to watch. Nine months later, Google Talk has been released. [...]