Curiouser and Curiouser!

Curiouser and Curiouser! on instant-messenger http://matt.blogs.it/ RSS feed for topic instant-messenger Copyright 2006 Matt Mower Squib/0.1 self@mattmower.com self@mattmower.com en-gb If Alice could talk Tue, 25 Jun 2002 11:08:08 +0100 <A href="http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/2002/06/25.html#a2504">Library Chat Greeter</A>. <A href="http://www.wiredbots.com/tutorial.html">Roll Your Own IM-bot</A> <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> "WiredBots: simple toolkits for making AIM and MSN Messenger IM bots." [<A href="http://boingboing.net/#85196400">Boing Boing</A>]</BLOCKQUOTE> This is too damn cool! If I was only a programmer, I would play around with it and create a library bot that patrons could query for bestseller lists, library hours, and eventually OPAC & database queries. Anybody else want to try until that day when pigs fly? Alternatively, maybe Andy B. could provide some assistance on this one.... [<A href="http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/">The Shifted Librarian</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » This sounds like a neat idea.  Combined with something like <A href="http://www.alicebot.org/">AliceBot</A> to provide dialogue/response I think it could be a very powerful tool packaged in a way lots of people will already find easy to access.  </BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000040.html BlogAgent Sun, 07 Jul 2002 11:15:52 +0100 <A href="http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/index.jsp?date=20020706#20020706054801">Russell Beattie</A> has a new IM-based blog notifier called BlogAgent, written in Java and open source. [<A href="http://www.scripting.com/">Scripting News</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » Just started using BlogAgent.  The ability to see who else is watching pages you are watching is pretty cool.  </BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000110.html Musing on my next Instant Messenger client Tue, 15 Oct 2002 18:50:14 +0100 Over the last 4 or 5 months since I've begun interacting with people from all over the world on a daily basis Instant Messenger has become a very big part of my life.  At the moment I use Trillian 0.74 and it's nice to not care which IM network someone else is using. But I'm ready to go beyond text and I was thinking about the kind of "multimedia realtime conversations" I would like to have.  I'm not sure how to describe this in text (and I'm no graphic artist so it's going to have to be text). I've tried Video messaging using NetMeeting and Yahoo.  They aren't what I want (although they have their place).  I don't so much want a "video conversation" as video in my conversation.  In the same way I might want a graphic, or a sound or just about anything. So what I have in mind is my standard IM with a media area and a timeline.  The timeline is on the side and keeps pace with "real time".  I have a drop-box window that contains a set of local objects I can work with (graphics, video, power point, sounds, etc...).  When I want to use one I drag it onto the timeline where I want it in the conversation. Now at the appropriate time my new IM client will push that object to the media area of the other participants.  If it's a URL then the media area would load the page, a movie or sound would start streaming, a powerpoint slide would appear, whatever makes sense. Some objects I might want the other person to be able to "drag off" their media area and save locally, others I might not.   That should be my choice.  I might also want to mark an "end-point" on the timeline so that something only plays for 'that long'. Just musing...   http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000726.html The expert web comes alive Thu, 17 Apr 2003 10:21:34 +0100 <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <A href="http://doc.weblogs.com/2003/04/17#yesThereAreMoreOfUs">Yes, there are more of us</A>. I'm a lot more careful than I may seem, at least when it comes to other family members. So I've been slow to blog about the good work my older son, <A href="http://globealive.blogspot.com/">Allen</A> (who is, like, 24 years older than the younger one), has quietly been doing on a project he only told me about a month ago, long after it was well underway. The project is <A href="http://globealive.com/">GlobeAlive</A>, the slogan of which is The World Live Web. It's basically a 'live' search engine: one that finds human beings who might be available to answer questions in real time. There's a lot of synergy with what <A href="http://globealive.com/">Britt</A> is doing with <A href="http://xpertweb.com">Xpertweb</A>, and what Mitch has been saying about the <A href="http://www.ratcliffe.com/bizblog/2003/03/23.html#a952">Strip Mall Infomediary</A>, both of which also, like GlobeAlive, could stand to benefit from the kind of identity infrastructure I wrote about in <A href="http://linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6741">Making Mydentity</A>, and expect to see coming out of <A href="http://www.sourceid.org">SourceID</A> and <A href="http://www.ascio.com/">similar</A> efforts. There are also natural synergies with <A href="http://www.smartmobs.com/index.html">smart mobbery</A>, <A href="http://www.socialtext.com/">social software</A>, <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0114939/outlines/moblog.html">moblogging</A>, and most of the stuff in <A href="http://blogs.it/0100198/">Marc's blogrolling column</A>. And, of course, instant messaging with presence detection, which is why Allen and friends are currently developing a new client that uses <A href="http://www.jabber.org">Jabber</A>. What prompts me to start talking about Allen's work with GlobeAlive is <A href="http://www.blaserco.com/blogs/">Britt Blaser</A>'s post yesterday, <A href="http://www.blaserco.com/blogs/2003/04/16.html#a124">What's That In Your Genes?</A> Britt does a nice (and flattering) job of explaining the fertile ground where the Xpertweb and GlobeAlive circles overlap. Some interesting context: Allen isn't your typical Web entrepreneur. He isn't even a techie. He's a writer and a philosopher whose research tends to want answers he found Google and other Web search engines didn't quite provide. What he wanted were the kind of answers you can only get from live human beings real experts on, say, relativity theory or Ludwig Wittgenstein (two subjects he mentioned in recent conversations). Not finding what he wanted with Web search engines, he decided to invent an engine that searched for live people. Here's how he explained it to me on the phone a few minutes ago: <BLOCKQUOTE> GlobeAlive is for when you want a person and not a site. If you want a site, Google's your engine. If you want a person, GlobeAlive is there for the job. Or will be. We're still in beta, although we have a very devoted group of people involved already. Is it for when you're looking for experts? It can be for any form of interaction; not just an expert answer, even though that's the most common use at this early stage. But I don't want this to be thought of as just another expert site. It's not just that. It's a live search engine. Later we may want to make a distinction between an expert, a conversationalist, or a somebody with something to sell. But for now the primary use will be to find experts, and get expert answers to questions. Where does it stand technically? We've been working and reworking it for going on two years now, but basically it's still in beta. Right now we're working with GlobeAlive desktop, which is a crappy instant messenger. That's why we're working on a Jabber client right now. What we're want next is to scale up on both the supply and the demand side. More experts, more participants, and more users doing searches. Right now it's like Google with a handful of Web sites to search. But we've been at this long enough to know that the idea does work, and it does scale. And it will grow organically, and in value. The bigger it gets, the better it gets. How does an expert keep from getting bothered by the wrong questions? You only come up in searches when you want to be found. Your keywords and nothing else. (It's a bit more complicated than that, I think; but that's what I wrote down.) What about your business model? Revenues come from paid placements. We've played with the word "chatvertising." In any case, appropriate advertising. Positive-value stuff. Nothing insulting or intrusive. And we want to put in financial incentives for participants in the form of tiered revenue sharing. </BLOCKQUOTE> I'm intrigued by the idea that the Web, or the Net, is missing a live element, in spite of all the efforts going on with VoIP, instant messaging and other stuff. And I'm impressed that Allen has already taken this thing as far as he has, entirely on its own bootstaps. He's funded it himself, out of his own pockets, and with the help of many friends who believe in the idea. He's also <A href="http://globealive.blogspot.com/">started a blog</A>. That's in beta too, but coming along nicely for a rookie effort. So check it out. Sign up, if it intrigues you. Since Allen's now out here in the blog world as well, I'm sure he'd be interested in all kinds of connections and constructive feedback. [<A href="http://doc.weblogs.com/">The Doc Searls Weblog</A>]</BLOCKQUOTE> GlobeAlive does look interesting so I signed up.  This is fairly simple although choosing the keywords to be associated with takes some time and is pretty much unassisted. In order to be available to help people you need to run one of their desktop clients.  I'm doing that now but I will be glad when I don't have to because it's awful.  The proferred Jabber is no more convenient for me than their own client.  I want something that lets me continue to use my existing IM client Trillian. Since nobody else seemed to be about to ask me a question I decided to try and chat with myself.  This experience has left me a little skeptical.  The client just connects, automatically.  There is no page-request, no introduction, the guest is unidentified and all I would get as a clue is their last search term (if any). As a protocol I think that this leaves a lot to be desired of.  It would only take a few false and/or malicious connections before I might wonder if this is going to be a bother. I think that the person wanting to chat should at least be asked their name, and a precis question.  Since I am, presumably, helping them for free I don't think it's too much to ask that I shouldn't have to do it blind! Anyway, that said, I am ready to help anyone on my choosen topics.  Ask away! http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001403.html Trillian 2.0, webEdit & Jabber. Tue, 05 Aug 2003 10:44:00 +0100 I'm using the new Trillian 2.0 beta.  So far it seems stable (just like 1.0), not too different - although I love the new tonal sound scheme.  What I was really waiting for was the Jabber support.  This works seamlessly (even though it's implemented as a plug-in) and has allowed me to develop a new application. Frontier has a webservice based code editing environment.  You can check objects out of the server, edit, then check them back in.  Although there is no version control it is a convenient way to edit server code.  However one of the issues is working out who is doing what.  I thought about a web page, or an RSS feed, but it actually seemed like a nice IM application. Since <A href="http://www.scripting.com/">Dave</A>, <A href="http://jake.userland.com/">Jake</A>, <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0001013/">Lawrence</A>, and <A href="http://www.jerf.org/irights/">Jeremy</A> had already <A href="http://frontier.userland.com/tcpIm">done the work</A> this was as easy as adding a call-back to the Frontier webEdit code that said tcp.im.send( message ) and Voila!  Instant notifications about who is working on what code. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001537.html Boycotting Y! and MSN Fri, 19 Sep 2003 13:25:11 +0100 <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <A href="http://www.henshall.com/blog/archives/000392.html">Yahoo to Lock out Trillian</A>. Yahoo makes a fatal blunder in following Microsoft to lock out Trillian users. Yahoo is responding to its current competitive definitions rather that thinking forward strategically. Trillians error is just the type of strategy advice I was given yesterday. [<A href="http://www.henshall.com/blog/">Unbound Spiral</A>]</BLOCKQUOTE> This sucks. Yahoo! and MSN both blocking 3rd party clients?  Unless Cerulean Studios can work around this as they have before then I shall be boycotting both those networks from Sep 24th and Oct 15th respectively. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001630.html Nimrods ye are Fri, 19 Sep 2003 16:52:44 +0100 <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <A href="http://www.scraprap.com/webx?14@211.Jlcoa6QgeoS.0@.1e6f62b3!discloc=.1e7db2ea">Dan Shafer calls us "nimrods" for turning off his IM client</A>. Well, the way I look at it is we're still a business. Our bandwidth costs us money. Our servers, and their upkeep, costs us money. My salary costs Microsoft money. Our shareholders demand that we return a profit (so much so that one shareholder recently asked us to stop giving money to charity -- I'll come back to that in a minute). Plus, we're making our service more secure and it does more now than it ever did before and now we'd like to start selling our IM infrastructure to third parties. Seems to me that's fair. Dan, do you work for free? How about you send me your latest books for free? Or, even better yet, what would your publisher say if I went to Borders, bought a book of yours, then retyped it and put it onto the Internet for all my readers to use for free? As to charity, one of our shareholders wants us to be forbidden to spend any money on charity. That's just plain bad business. Why? Because it makes me feel good as a Microsoft employee that Microsoft is one of the world's largest charitable givers -- it's a major reason that Microsoft has one of industry's lowest turnover rates. It also improves our brand's reputation (which does need all the help it can get). It also lets us invest in growing areas like education that can't afford the latest technology. That lets us learn best practices that we can incorporate into our products. [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/">The Scobleizer Weblog</A>]</BLOCKQUOTE> No you're nimrods. You're trying to defend cutting off the oxygen to vendor neutral IM.   I'd think the same if I found that my next Outlook upgrade suddenly meant I could only email other Outlook users. I'll be boycotting MSN from October until a work-around is found.  Of course you could save me this bother and just make your damn software interoperable! http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001633.html Whose the nimrod now? Fri, 19 Sep 2003 20:17:22 +0100 Following up on my previous post about MSN messenger and Trillian it looks like I was wrong which, I guess, makes me the nimrod in this case. If Microsoft are providing a way for any client to integrate properly with the MSN infrastructure and simply charging users for using their infrastructure then I have no complaint (provided the charge is reasonable).  As to the argument about it being free using MSN but not free using a 3rd party client well I guess Microsoft must be getting something back by users using the MSN client. In this light Microsoft's approach seems better than that of either Yahoo or AOL who both seem intent on destroying the idea of vendor neutral IM. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001637.html How Skype does it Wed, 08 Oct 2003 11:41:48 +0100 <div style="margin-left: 40px;"><a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/5/33278.html">How does Skype get through Firewalls and NAT Routers?</a>. SuperNodes [<a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk">The Register</a>] </div> Interesting.  You find out there is a call for you and make an outbound TCP call to the SuperNode to meet it.  That's neat thinking ;-) Also as an aside when I installed Skype a couple of weeks ago I was regularly seeing around 30,000 online users.  Last time I checked it was regularly around 60,000. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001651.html Skype control Sun, 16 Nov 2003 16:52:09 +0000 Just received a <a href="http://www.skype.com/">Skype</a> call from someone who "wanted to talk to someone in England."  This has lead me to discover that Skype has an option which, if enabled, only allows incoming calls from people on your friends list.  I'm happier with this as a default.  If you want to get in touch just IM me first and I can make you a friend (or not.) http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001732.html Enterprise Instant Messenger real Tue, 30 Mar 2004 06:48:18 +0100 <blockquote><a href="http://www.corante.com/getreal/archives/002719.html">New Osterman Survey Shows Enterprise IM Use Growing</a>. A recent survey my Osetrman Research shows continued acceptance of instant messaging inthe enterprise, according to Demir Barlas at Line56.com. "With a sample space of 195 employees, the survey found that 44 percent are currently using IM "for business applications,"... [<a href="http://www.corante.com/getreal/">Get Real</a>]</blockquote> An interesting and encouraging sign. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002029.html #joiito, #kmtalk Fri, 09 Apr 2004 18:24:19 +0100 Since the <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/2004/04/02.html#a1394">dinner</a> last week I have found myself hanging around in <a href="http://joi.ito.com/joiwiki/IrcChannel">#joiito</a> quite a bit.  <a href="http://chocnvodka.blogware.com/blog">Suw</a> kindly introduced me to the folks there.  It's a great group - if a little schizophrenic at times - full of interesting people.  You can always be assured of something to whet the appetite! But, beyond this, I've realised what a fabulous community building tool IRC is.  Instant messenger has become an essential tool and IM (and I imagine, even more so, Skype) conference chats are great for focused collaboration.  IRC seems to have something different.  It's something about the way the channel is permanent, but people drop in and out as they can.  Bots are written to offer assistance.  Conversations run into side conversations.  It's all a big mess, but a beautiful one and it works. For this reason I am now going to hang around in a channel called #kmtalk on <a href="http://www.freenode.net/">freenode</a> IRC (details of how to get there are <a href="http://www.freenode.net/using_the_network.shtml">here</a>).  If anyone is looking to chat about knowledge management, communities of practice, collaboration, effectiveness or any of those sorts of topic I am offering this as a good starting point. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002054.html Presenting People Centred Knowledge Management at the CiG Thu, 29 Apr 2004 18:16:24 +0100 On Tuesday night I did my first proper speakers gig, giving a 20 minutes presentation of People Centred Knowledge Management (PCKM) to members of the <a href="http://www.cityinformation.org.uk">City Information Group</a> (I'll link to their event page when it's been updated). I had a great time doing the event and I've had some positive feedback - I hope everyone there got something out of it. My thanks to the <a href="http://www.cityinformation.org.uk/Committee/committee.htm">organizers</a> Jackie, Genevieve and Nick. <ul> <li><a href="http://matt.blogs.it/gems/presentations/CIG_apr_2004/CIG%20Presentation.htm">Web</a> version of the presentatin. (Should work in all browsers, but you know PowerPoint) </li> <li><a href="http://matt.blogs.it/gems/presentations/CIG_apr_2004/CIG%20Presentation_export.pdf">PDF</a> version of the presentation here. (447K)</li> <li><a href="http://matt.blogs.it/gems/maps/cig_apr_2004/Speakers%20notes.html">Speakers notes</a> (This will give you a better idea of what I said).</li> </ul> I'd like to express my thanks to <a href="http://paolo.evectors.it/">Paolo</a>, <a href="http://www.dijest.com/aka/">Phil</a>, <a href="http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/">David</a>, and <a href="http://chocnvodka.blogware.com/blog">Suw</a> who were all invaluable in helping me to get prepared. I think it really paid off. Update: It occurs to me that really you don't get very much from my slides. The presentation was a lot about me talking, waving my arms and hopping up and down. You don't get that from PowerPoint. Next time I'd like to be able to webcast the presentation. Anyone have any advice about that sort of thing? http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002137.html Getting creative: five social tools to give you an edge! Mon, 28 Jun 2004 23:33:29 +0100 Tomorrow I'm speaking at the <a href="http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/x0007eaf6">Gurteen Knowledge Conference</a>.  My topic is: <blockquote>Getting Creative: Five social tools to give you an edge! </blockquote> My aim is to establish the link between creativity and social networks, and then to show how tools like blogs, wikis, instant messaging and topics can be combined to help build a culture of creativity. This is only my second speaking engagement.  Wish me luck! http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002366.html A sidebar your honour Wed, 04 Jan 2006 10:32:32 +0000 I don't presume that we invented it but I have noticed that <a href="http://paolo.evectors.it/">Paolo</a> and I have a neat protocol for sidebar conversations. When chatting with Paolo we often drift off at tangents while persuing our main topic and responses to these tangents are given (in parentheses). This thread of the conversation then continues alongside the main thread, in parentheses, until it finishes. At a later point other sidebars may occur. It's neat. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00003136.html