K-57

Do you Yahoo!? (Instant Messaging for the rest of us)

Imagine this scenario: You're at work and you pick up a blue phone to call the corporate office. When you're done, you pick up the red phone to call the customer back. Later in the day, on your break when you want to call your sister in New York, you use the yellow phone. Yes, the Green phone is for calling home. The more I read about Voice Over IP (VOIP) systems, the more I envision this scenario. Skype and Vonage seem to be examples of systems gaining ground.

Who would put up with this? Limited to calling only people with the same service? (for no extra charge)

Wait a minute. I do that every day with instant messaging. I've gotten so used to talking to people from AOL/AIM; MSN and Yahoo! that I forget I'm using different services. I use One program to access all of my IM contacts from each of the services. I tried to get people to switch to the "best messenger" with little or no luck. "No, I am used to [fill in favorite messenger here]" seemed to be the most popular reply.

I still have blue (MSN), yellow (AOL/AIM) and red (Yahoo!) contacts (I don't use ICQ, green, any more) but I've become so used to it I forget the details of what goes on in the background. The program is called Trillian and it combines all of my IM contacts into a single interface so I don't have to load AIM to talk to AOL contacts or any of the other messenger programs.

Anyway, I support the program and with the release of two things (The movie and the new Trillian promotional website) I decided to mention it here.

Tag: IM

posted by Kev @ 5/03/2005 06:07:00 PM