Posts from the Im Category at The Social Software Weblog

CA AG candidate launches RSS to IM notification system

Posted May 25th 2006 5:23PM by Marshall Kirkpatrick
Filed under: IM, nptech, RSS

California Attorney General candidate Rocky Delgadillo doesn't just have a long list of endorsements on his side - he's got new web tools going for him as well. Delgadillo's campaign just launched a new service offering for supporters wanting to keep up with the campaign - RSS to IM notification from immedi.at.

The letters RSS don't appear anywhere on the site, in fact there's not a link to subscribe to news from the campaign in a feed reader - but there is a link that allows you to plug in your IM username and get instant notification of new developments that can be passed on to others. Timely updates have an excitement that may be more likely to spread by word of mouth.

Delgadillo's "vision" page begins with the sentence: "As I look around our state today, it's not just crime and violence that threaten our families. It's also the greed and arrogance of corporate power run amok." Sounds interesting enough to me. I wonder how extensively the campaign is using RSS to IM internally.

Female-named chat users get 25X more malicious comments

Posted May 19th 2006 7:54PM by Marshall Kirkpatrick
Filed under: collaboration, Identity 2.0, IM

The University of Maryland has released a new study finding that chat room users with female names receive twenty five times more malicious comments than users registered with typically male or gender ambiguous names. Female usernames, on average, received 163 malicious private messages a day in the study! It appears that the definition of malicious was relatively straight forward, too. Further proof that technology doesn't solve all our social problems (did we need further proof?) even if no one on the internet does know you're a dog.

Found via Nancy White, author of the Full Circle Online Interaction Blog and an expert in IM/chat. Several months ago I interviewed Nancy about international chat strategies and related topics.

IM bot contest at MSN

Posted May 16th 2006 1:20PM by Marshall Kirkpatrick
Filed under: IM, Microsoft

Who knew that invading robots could be so charming? MSN is having a contest for IM bot development, the creation of automated IM buddies you can add to notify you whenever something in particular is available. Like the MakeBot or AIM's handy news bots. My girlfriend often hears my Adium quack and asks "who's IMing you?" We both get a kick out of saying, "it's only a robot."

What are your favorite IM bots? What functionalities would you like to see in a robot buddy? I don't use many right now, but my favorite hands down is Peter Brown's immedi.at. What would I like in a future bot? A bot that knows whether I'm online and sends me an SMS if I'm not, like Rasasa does to people other than US Verizon users like me. And the ability to differentiate between message instructions, as in "for these 3 alerts, text me if I'm off-line, for all my other alerts just send an IM or nothing." I'd also like to have some thresh-hold setting capabilities. As in, notify me once more than 3 people have tagged the Social Software Weblog "brilliant" or "foolish" in del.icio.us. Ok, so not that in particular - but you can imagine.

What about you? What would you like to see an army of invading MSN bots bring?
Contesty goodness found via Programmable Web.

IM, workflow and customer service: checking in with Library 2.0

Posted Apr 17th 2006 12:55PM by Marshall Kirkpatrick
Filed under: IM

I'm a big fan of the Library 2.0 movement, and today's post on IM use by reference librarians from Tame the Web: Libraries and Technology caught my eye. A lengthy discussion on the use of IM, the changing job descriptions and communication demands on librarians, and links out to related places. If you found last week's NY Times story on IM at work interesting, you may enjoy this more in depth discussion of the practice in a specific context - regardless of what field you work in yourself.

NYTimes on the rise of IM

Posted Apr 6th 2006 7:32PM by Marshall Kirkpatrick
Filed under: IM

Instant Messaging gets covered in the New York Times yesterday as a key new means of communication in business. I'm guessing most people reading here already knew that, but the article has a certain charm. Presence status really is nice. Some of my favorite quotes from the Times:

"At Amerex, he said, the I.M. system is more mission-critical than the phone system."
"e-mail is woefully inadequate for guaranteed message delivery, and clumsy when it comes to conducting business in real time."
"All of which means the end could be near for business voice mail, as more and more companies adopt instant messaging."

Filter an OPML file for keywords and IM me with results? It's on its way!

Posted Mar 30th 2006 1:08PM by Marshall Kirkpatrick
Filed under: email, IM, RSS, OPML, reputation

I couldn't be more excited about the work being done over at ZapTXT, a great service that filters your selected RSS feeds for keywords and will send you an IM, email or SMS whenever new results appear. Now the service is answering the call of users who want to filter multiple RSS feeds bundled into an OPML file all for the same query without having to repeat set-up for each feed filtered. No idea when that feature will be available, but that's what the good folks at ZapTXT are working on.

Will this pull them ahead of competitors in the space like immedi.at and Rasasa? We'll see!

Mobber makes inline web chat easy

Posted Mar 25th 2006 4:44PM by Marshall Kirkpatrick
Filed under: collaboration, IM

Check this out, from Mobber.com via eHub:

There are a lot of very nice features to this and I'd say it works quite well. There are down sides too, but it's only been live for like 48 hours. Login is very easy, the design intuitive and quite functional. Couldn't be simpler to install. There isn't sound or any other way to notify you that you have got a new message except for a visual cue you'll only see if you are looking at the box in the same tab, etc. Also a bummer that usernames are limited to 7 characters.

In case you are wondering, it does show all the users online on any site, but the ones on the site you are on are displayed first. I like it. One thing I'm not sure about is whether it will work if I put it in my personal blog's sidebar. Presumably it only tells me if users are on the same URL, not within the same domain? I wonder. I'll have to test that out next.

Thanks to Brian Benzinger of SolutionWatch.com who helped me test this out. He's got a review of a related product called Mabber as well. Wonder if Mobber got the URL first and Mabber got the product to the public first? One way or the other, Mobber.com looks like a winner. Any readers here care to join me in a little chat to try it out? I might even notice that you sent me a message.

Cell phone IM malware reportedly on the loose

Posted Mar 18th 2006 2:16PM by Marshall Kirkpatrick
Filed under: IM

Textually.org has coverage of files being IMed to cell phones that will scan for passwords and credit card numbers. In conjunction with last week's RFID virus, this is just a reminder that no matter what a new platform is, there's going to be danger there. The increasing automation of that danger crossed with the increasing intimacy with which we engage these technological platforms seems the biggest cause for concern. Know what I mean? Evil actions by a human being that I may or may come in contact with are one end of this spectrum, an evil bot jumping from cell phone to cell phone is close to the other end of that spectrum.

ZapTXT: Rapid notification options expand

Posted Mar 7th 2006 7:19PM by Marshall Kirkpatrick
Filed under: IM, RSS

I just came across ZapTXT today via eHub; it's a service that filters RSS feeds for keywords and sends you an email or text message to your phone when the keyword appears. The site claims to ping RSS feeds every few minutes. Sounds great, but I'd like IM notification.

I can get IM notification of RSS feed updates using immedi.at for free, or I can get IM, email or SMS messages when feeds are updated for a small fee with Rasasa - does anyone know where I can get SMS, email or IM and feeds filtered for keywords? Update: Just got an email back from the Zaptxt folks, they say it's something they will likely be supporting in the future. Cool!

These sorts of always-on awareness tools can work well with ubiquitous connectivity, and I'm betting that the field is just beginning to form. All of the above features would fit nicely within Feedburner, wouldn't they? Well, a guy can dream.

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