Walking the thin line between revealing just the right amount of information and retaining my liberty, or giving away too much information and getting locked up in the Tower of London for the rest of my natural…
In the Collaboration Tools project are a set of (broadly speaking) weighted user defined requirements.
That’s actually only a partially correct description, but it’s better than nowt so we’ll run with it for now.
There are nine distinct functional points which (a) Collaboration Tool(s) should deliver, but obviously the management view requires the full range of functions to be delivered through the smallest number of products.
Real Time Communications (RTC) is on the list of requirements as a medium-to-high desirability tool, but the question in my head is whether to focus on a ‘chat’ type product or a ‘twitter’ type product.
For some reason both lines of RTC seem to have their feet dangled in a pool of client software.
This is Not Good from my perspective – to achieve a truly functional collaborative environment RTC can really only be delivered through a browser-based product.
However, I’m testing out both types of product.
1. IM/Chat (using my Microsoft profile) via the http://meebo.com web product and Microsoft’s own Windows Live Messenger client, and
2. Twitter using http://twitter.com and their own web product and the Twitteroo client (my profile name is – unsurprisingly – http://twitter.com/brennig).
So…
Does anyone use these two technologies (IM/Chat or Twitter) and if so what is your weapon of choice – browser tools or client installations?
And if client installations – which ones?
And why client over browser?
And if browser products – which ones?
And why browser over client?
Ta!
🙂
B.
I twit from the web (directly from the twitter website even though I have a Firefox add-on that I never use) and IM from a client.
I could use my client to twit, but (1) I like my pretty twitter background and (2) I like to be able to twit without being connected on my IM (I can pop in, say one thing, or read a few updates, and then do something else – like working – for one hour without anybody resenting me from not talking to them).
Basically, I like both being independent, because I use twitter as a “micro-blogging” tool and IM to have private conversations with people, which is just not the same thing. Oh and if I enjoy playing with the 140 characters limit in twitter, I would hate having to do that on IM 😉
I IM through a client (Pidgin – formerly Gaim – in my case, because it’s open source, in any case I am on Linux now, and I can have all my contacts from different protocols within the same application) mainly because I’ve started doing so in 2002 and like it enough this way that I have never tried out to do it from a browser.
Oh, and I’m following you now. You should figure out who I am without too many difficulties (the bio and languages used should help, I would think).
Current company uses skype – not for the phone functionality (I never plug my headset in) but for the IM functionality. Every company I’ve worked for in the past decade has had a version of. I’m not sure why you would go with one over another – last company had one called Jabber, which had a good conference room function, but I wouldn’t necessarily go with it before skype.
Obviously all of these are client, but I couldn’t tell you why (never been involved in deployment decisions)
C: Yeah, I saw straight through your cunning disguise. Those galoshes, that Sou’ Wester, the dark glasses and the Celtic FC football scarf hid nothing from me. 🙂 Following you, following me, following you, following me. Aha! (He said in a Steve Coogan kind of voice).
Steve: Thanks for the info. Skype isn’t a runner for my current customer, its peer-to-peer nature is a technical breach of the JANET AUP (even though a number of HEIs/JANET subscribers use it).
Just a precision, Jabber is a protocol (implemented for instance in GTalk or whatever Google’s IM associated with GMail is called), not a client.
Alright, the geeky me is going to bed now.