Instant Messaging - the new way to communicate

By PETER SINCLAIR

Millions upon millions of people use it every day - at work, at home, for essential business or the simple pleasure of having a bit of a natter over the back fence of the net.

Instant messaging: it's essentially the old pen-pal idea accelerated to cyber-speed: as intimate as a letter, as immediate as the phone, even more spontaneous than e-mail.

Who uses it? About half the online population, it seems - recent guesstimates suggest a user-base of over 100 million worldwide.

Swotting students can swap facts and figures instantly; it's great for the hearing-impaired who have a problem with telephones; negotiators use it as a tool to exchange private messages right there at the bargaining-table; and on business "intranets," it's a quick way for employees in different departments to communicate without yelling across the room - IBM classes it as a "mission-critical operation," says its IT vice-president John Patrick; its own Lotus SameTime can now encrypt and firewall internal messages.

Most of all, it's a new delivery-system for friendship. IM promises to revolutionise our lives in the same way e-mail has.

But IM is different from e-mail - it is proprietary technology, with no common standard between different applications (interoperability), which means at this stage you won't necessarily be able to get in touch with a friend who has chosen a different brand from yours.

For there's a big dog snarling in the manger - America Online.

IM's sudden popularity is largely responsible for the overwhelming success of its first provider, AOL, allowing the company to increase its shoe-size enormously after a recent merger with Time Warner. Despite legislative pressure to force it to hold hands with everyone else, CEO Steve Case is still baulking.

So you need to choose your IM "client" with care - bigger is better, because you'll have more people with whom to interact - or you may choose more than one program, as I do, although I find it's best to run only one at a time.

Before you install, though, bear in mind that instant messaging's always-on accessibility can also drive you crazy, especially at times when you just can't spare a second for a casual chat.

You can erect a fence by putting up a choice of icons to let people know you're busy, but they'll often vault it. Or you can make yourself "invisible" to selected users.

The best idea, I've found - although it rather defeats the purpose of IM - is to prevent your instant messager from autoloading at start-up. Click it on only when you need to contact someone, or have time to catch up on the goss.

THE PLAYERS

OL Instant Messenger (AIM 4.3): The first widely adopted messager and second-largest IM service, AIM is one of the simplest to set up and use.

Its most powerful feature is the "buddy-list," since copied by everyone else, allowing you to maintain a list of people you might want to message and then keep tabs on who is at present online.

Features cyber-gaming, instant news alerts, easy file-swapping to share photos and sound-files, plus IP telephony - live conversations online. Netscapers have it built in. Latest add-on is AIM Express, letting you access your buddy-list from any computer anywhere.

ICQ 2000 b: ICQ ("I Seek You"), an Israeli program since snapped up by AOL to clinch its dominance of the field, is the ultimate instant messager, chosen by more than 50 million people worldwide.

Everything that AIM has and a bit more, including a slew of features the average surfer will probably never use or even discover, for ICQ has grown increasingly complex over time. Your best course is to click on the ICQ logo, select Preferences, and work systematically through the multitude of check-boxes on each and every tab, using common sense. Whew ...

MSN Messenger: late to market, Microsoft has caught up in a hurry with a handsome synthesis of what everyone else is doing, plus a novel "typing indicator" to see when someone is typing a message. Chat-rooms like Teen Warehouse are catching on fast, and in March it will become interoperable between Vodafone and Telecom for computer-to-mobile text messaging. Now bundled with everything else on new Windows computers, it is becoming ubiquitous - no wonder AOL refuses to grant it interoperability.

Odigo 3.0: another Israeli startup (the word means "guide" in ancient Greek) offers an ingenious, feature-rich and graphically elegant interface that leaves all other contenders in the shade. Features a tool for finding users with common interests, an instant note-poster for web-pages, and a communications tool with which you can chat one-on-one or in a multi-user chat-room at any website.

There's a variety of skins, and Zulu meets Eskimo when there's a choice of 17 different language versions. Other novelties are a gallery of over 200 avatars from which you can choose a visual online identity for yourself, and a daily mood-icon to let everyone know how you're feeling - mellow, angry, flirtatious, bored (you may wish there was a "hassled" icon when everyone starts talking at once).

Yahoo! Messenger: low-profile in the messaging stakes, but gaining ground - features alerts for stock-quotes and mail, news, weather and sports scores, and a Yahooligans version for kids.

Among the smaller players, Chinese-speaking readers may want to install Inforian's 8dCall; there's MacPopUp for Apple LANs; and newcomer Active Buddy, which has just signed up Reuters, offers News Buddies, Weather Buddies, Sport Buddies, Game Buddies.

It's a friendly new world.

Links:

Lotus SameTime

America Online
AOL Instant Messenger

ICQ

MSN Messenger

Odigo

Yahoo Messenger

8d Call

MacPopUp

ActiveBuddy