Instant Messaging
March 23, 2005
IM Security Threats
The number of IM-based security threats is rising. Add that to the recent buzz about AOL’s EULA allowing them to read and otherwise make use of the contents chat sessions. The answer? Use Jabber or encrypt your AIM sessions.
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August 30, 2004
The Emerging Presence Clearinghouse
Posting at Between the Lines, Chris Jablonski writes about presence technologies in the workplace. One of the things slowing down the adoption of presence is the lack of tools for integrating presence messages to present a clear picture of who in the organization is available and for what. The article points to a research report from Nemertes Research on the emerging presence clearinghouse.
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June 22, 2004
Yahoo! and AOL Quit the Enterprise IM Space
First Yahoo! and now AOL have quit the enterprise IM game. This isn’t so much a sign that enterprises are giving up on IM, or not taking to it, but rather that businesses are reluctant to pay for something they have been getting for free. Apparently identity management and logging aren’t enough of a benefit to justify monthly fees for many companies. I think there’s some big changes afoot in the enterprise messaging space and this is just one small sign of the turmoil.
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June 11, 2004
IM Records in iChat
If you use iChat for work, you may want to record your iChat sessions for later recall. You can always save any individual session using the “File -> Save a Copy As” commands. If you want to do it more systematically, go to “iChat -> Preferences -> Messages” and check the box “Automatically save chat transcripts” and select a folder. Now every chat session will be saved to disk. To browse or search those transcripts, there’s a handy little program called Logorrhea from Spiny.com that does a great job of letting you find and review your past chats. Even better, its free.
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February 06, 2004
At Last, Someone to Talk To!
AOL has released AIM 5.5 which includes iChat compatible streaming video. At last there will be someone to talk to. I’ve used iChat’s video feature several times and it really works. Jon Udell and I had a real conversation a few weeks ago that was much more than an IM exchange or even a phone conversation because of the presence of video. Now, if Apple would reciprocate and incorporate digital certificates in iChat, I’d be happy (for a few minutes at least).
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December 18, 2003
Instant Messaging InfoFest
If you’ve got any kind of interest in instant messaging, you owe it to yourself to read the many interesting articles in ACM Queue. Here are a few highlights:
- A Conversation with Peter Ford talks to the man behind MSN Messenger and a SIP advocate.
- On Helicopters and Submarines does a good job of making the case for Jabber as the common protocol.
- Beyond Instant Messaging discusses three projects that extend presence in ways that make it more useful.
One of the projects discussed in the last article talks about a system called Awarenex which puts activity indicators in the buddy list such as indicating when the person has a meeting scheduled on their calendar or even when they’re on the phone. You can get some of this right now on the Mac using iChatStatus, a scriptable application that let’s you automatically change your iChat status from a script. Mine let’s people know what song I’m listening to in iTunes, but I don’t see why it couldn’t be programmed to tell people when I’m on a trip or have a meeting scheduled.
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September 24, 2003
IM in the Enterprise
I’m a fan of instant messaging (IM) in my personal and my corporate life. I’ve used IM as a tool for getting my work done for years and love the face-to-face style conversation with people who aren’t right next door. Sure, there’s the phone, but phone calls have more overhead than IM. If I’ve got a lot to say, I use the phone. When I just have a quick question, or want a low intensity conversation, I fire up iChat (OS X’s AOL compatible chat tool). I’ve seen IM used in some interesting ways:
- Business colleagues use IM it for back channel communications during conference calls. In todayâs high-speed business culture, meetings frequently happen on the telephone with most meeting participants in different locations and a teleconferencing bridge serving as the modern-day answer to the conference room. IM is a great way to carry on important side-bar conversations that used to happen in whispers or passed notes.
- Geographically dispersed workgroups use IM to create a sense of workplace community and even coordinate complex tasks by remote teams. At iMALL, our engineers used IM to roll code into production in the middle of the night when the service was lightly loaded. Rather than everyone coming into work, they all gathered in their bathrobes and slippers in front of their computer screens and coordinated a difficult task using IM.
Even with my cheerleading there are things that concern me about IM when I put my CIO hat on:
- Recreational-class IM systems are not tied into corporate directories, so its hard to IM someone who I’m not already in contact with.
- IM conversations are not encrypted and may travel outside the corporate firewall.
- Easy file sharing can be just one more, unprotected avenue for viruses to invade the workplace.
- Some conversations need to be logged for regulatory compliance.
There are ways to solve these problems. One method is to provide an in-house IM solution. Groupwise, for example, has a built-in IM solution, although I’ve not used it and don’t know how well it works. The State of Utah is using it, maybe someone can comment below on how well it works. The problem with an in-house system is that it probably isn’t compatible with your customer’s and partner’s systems and some of the most important IM conversations are those your employees have with customers and partners.
Another solution is to try to fix the problems in AOL, MSN, ICQ, and Yahoo!’s offerings with a third party solution. One such solution is L7 from Akonix. I haven’t reviewed this product, so I can’t comment on how well, or even if, it works. The company literature says that L7 logs IM traffic, selectively stops file sharing, and secures conversations between parties. Sounds like it would be worth looking into.
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February 24, 2003
Your Phone as a Proxy for Presence
One of my pet feature requests is the ability to use my Bluetooth enabled phone to indicate presence. The idea is simple. Rather than having to manually click on “available” or “checkback later” in iChat, I want it to select automatically based on whether or not my Buetooth-enabled T68i phone is near-by. Since I always have it with me, its a convenient proxy for my presence. Someone has recently solved this problem, or at least the hard part.
Today, Will Cox points me to Sony Ericsson Clicker a handy program that let’s you use a Bluetooth phone to control a powerpoint slideshow, iTunes, or any applescriptable application. Being relatively new to the Mac, I’m not that familiar with AppleScript, but presuming that iChat has AppleScript hooks, my dream could become a reality.
I downloaded the preview release of the software (which is going to stop working on Mar 1, 2003 according to the web site) and installed it on my PowerBook. The instructions are clear and work great. One note: you may not have a PreferencePanes folder in your personal library (~/Library/PreferencePanes); just create it. I fired it up and in minutes was controlling a PowerPoint presentation. This is way cooler than the KeySpan device I currently use to control PowerPoint remotely for one simple reason: Convergence!
The next little experiment was really too cool. Clicker can take action based on presence, so I set it up to pause iTunes when I leave the room and start playing when I return. Worked like a charm. My computer now senses my presence and takes the action I’ve selected. This is totally the right thing. Apple needs to make this part of OSX.
Now for the bad news. iChat is apparently not scriptable. I was able to activate it from AppleScript, but not set my status. This program can set the status using an internal, undocumented API. Ugh. I installed it and now the title of whatever’s playing in iTune is displayed as my “status” in iChat. So, with both programs, you get presence in iChat from a T68i phone: if my status is “Quiet in iTunes” then my phone is not near my computer. :-)
Come on Apple! Let’s get AppleScript support in iChat! There’s coolness there.
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January 29, 2003
Hey Apple! A Feature I Want in iChat
I was just sitting here working and noticed on my AIM buddy list that someone had gone red. That is, they marked themselves as “being away” even though they’re still logged in. This of course is perfect. One of the things i like most about IM is presence; that is, knowing when someone is around in my virtual world. The problem is that people don’t usually do this. They let the machine mark them as idle (not bad) or log out (which means they could be there and just not logged in). What I want is for my computer to know when I’m there and when I’ve stepped away…even if I’m not using it. The great part is that I have all the pieces that would form a solution right now.
I use bluetooth on my powerbook and have a Sony T68i bluetooth equipped phone. I want iChat to mark me available (unless I override) whenever my powerbook can see my phone and mark me away when it can’t. My phone becomes my “presence” token. I don’t know if iChat has the right hooks to be able to script something like this or not, but it would be a neat feature.
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October 16, 2002
IM Bots
A couple of months ago, I wrote about IM bots because the idea intrigued me and I think it would be a neat way to offer some interactive information on Utah.gov as well as internal applications like help desk. Joe Heck turned me on to some other resources that are pretty interesting:
- DJ Adams has an article about ChatBot, a Jabber bot written in Perl using the Net::Jabber libraries.
- Infobot is a daemon that connects to IRC servers and can be customized to conduct various chats. IRC isn’t IM, but its still interesting.
- An article in The Perl Journal by Kevin Lenzo has a number of links and information about various bots for IRC (again with the IRC).
I guess before we worry about an IM Bot, we ought to get an enterprise IM solution. I’ve seen IRC used to great effect as an enterprise tool and feel like we’re missing out by not supporting it more widely. Not sure where we need to go to get there. Its hard to drum up interest among a large enough group of people because not many of them use IM. On the other hand, I’m hesitant to suggest it widely without a secure way for employees to use it in their work. A classic chicken and egg problem.
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August 15, 2002
Of All the Stupid...
Yesterday I wrote about IM Bots. A pretty cool idea. Today I see in this Internet World article that ActiveBuddy has won a patent on the idea. I’m not a rabid anti-patent kind of guy, but this one seems pretty wimpy. There’s plenty of prior art (like this Eliza IRC bot from June 1999). But whats more, small companies rarely win by having a patent. That’s for IBM and other large companies who can employ hundreds of corporate attorneys. Even there most of them primarily use their patents defensively rather than offensively. The best way for a company like ActiveBuddy to win in the market is to spend their time and money on innovation, not in the courtroom.
I once had business dealings with a company called CoolSavings. They have a patent on online coupons. They spent so much time trying to convince us that we had to do business with them or they were going to come after us in court that we never did get to a business deal. I don’t think its a smart way to do business.
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August 14, 2002
IM Bots
Rick Gee turned me on to this. There was a story today on NPR about bots that interact with people over IM. If you go to Active Buddy, you can interact with some of their bots. They are essentially Eliza programs with a better database, or at least that’s what it seems. eBay apparently uses one for FAQs. All in all, a pretty clever use of IM, in my book.
A few questions:
- Does anyone know if there’s a IM interface to Ask Jeeves? I couldn’t find one on their site. Seem like a natural.
- I don’t see (with a quick look) any similar development efforts for Jabber. Does anyone have pointers to something like this for Jabber?
This seems like it would be pretty easy to put together for utah.gov as a FAQs, for kids to ask questions on homework, etc.
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July 08, 2002
IM and REST: First Class Events?
After posting the previous piece about IM and REST, I happened to see a reference to work DJ Admans is doing with weblog updates and Jabber on Scripting News. The basic idea, as I understand it, is to use Jabber in lieu of something like MQSeries or JMS to notify people of changes to weblogs. I see the usefulness of that: remember those discussions in your undergraduate architecture class about polling vs. interrupts?
News aggregators function by polling their RSS feeds. If everyone on the net used news aggregators and subscribed to hundreds of channels and wanted near realtime notification of changes to resources (not unreasonable if I’m to use it for things like monintoring systems or my airline reservation) the whole thing would drop to its knees. Interrupts (i.e event notification) are the answer.
Now, the RESTian response, I’m confident, would be HTTPEvents. Not a bad idea and certainly something I’d like to see developed further. From a RESTian point of view, using a system like Jabber or JMS to manage events takes them out of the “first class citizen” category (from a programming language theory point of view). In a programming language, anything that can be manipulated within the programming language itself is a first class citizen. So, for example, functions are first class citizens in ML, but not in Pascal (don’t even think about C—it gets too weird). In REST, to be first class, you need a URI and (probably) use HTTP.
So, maybe the question for RESTians is how far to go with the religion and when to get practical (and I’m not saying that they’ve gone too far yet). One example of a language where everything is first class is LISP. An elegant language. I love it. Nevertheless, not a winner in the language wars. If REST wants to “win,” RESTians may have to decide when enough is enough.
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IM and REST
Technology review has a nice introductory article on the problems with IM in the enterprise. Says the article:
But today that promise is stymied by IM software packages that use their own proprietary protocols. “The whole IM scene is as factionalized as Afghanistan,” says Rob Batchelder, research director at Gartner, a technology research firm in Stamford, CT.
My main concern is how to use IM behind the firewall with security, logging, etc. at a price that gives an ROI I can see without using a microscope. I’ve been playing with jabber lately and have been pretty impressed. I’ve haven’t even started to consider the interoperability issues. I guess I don’t quite see it yet. For example:
“Imagine,” says Sonu Aggarwal, CEO of Cordant, a Bellvue, WA maker of IM gateway software, “having a contact in your IM buddy list that represents your Delta flight reservation. Rather than having to call an 800-number and digging up your reservation code, that ‘buddy’ is your ticket, constantly communicating the status of the reservation.”
What I don’t get is why I need an IM system to do this for me. If the airline reservation system is well designed and my reservation has a URI, my aggregator can do that same job without interoperability of IM systems, new ports opened on the firewall, etc. Maybe I’m high, but I don’t see it yet.
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July 04, 2002
Jabber
I got jabber running on my test server. I’ve had trouble getting the SSL support going, but its on the way (netstat -ar shows jabberd listening on port 5223 and openssl successfully retrieves the cert from jabberd). The abundance of clients is good. With SSL, my security concerns are slackened and it logs on the server and client sides. Not bad. This may be the right IM tool for the enterprise.