[Air-l] What is Instant Messaging

[jeremy hunsinger]

i don't see a substantial difference  in either esp. when one gets to 
be a high end user of a unix system because everything you say is 
different is scriptable.   most of the difference is entirely in the 
interface, or the appearance of what the system does, not in its basic 
architecture.  sure, who does not list all the status's  but status's 
like away and busy have been in use on irc for years, etc.  the queuing 
of messages by status has been in eggdrop bots for a while now, it is 
send message x on condition y.  in short, hci research will say there 
is a fundamental difference in the way people use systems, but as i 
said, with systems like fire, ichat, and eveybuddy, this set of 
differences based on interface is collapsed, because these systems 
appropriate the im's interfaces and map them over the functionality of 
irc, talk, etc.
On Wednesday, December 18, 2002, at 01:29 AM, Quentin (Gad) Jones wrote:

> jeremy hunsinger wrote:
>> a problem is that online awareness is the unix command who
>
> A who command is totally different to having a series of names 
> constantly displayed with different colours and icons to signify 
> status.  There is a huge amount of HCI research to support this as a 
> fundamental difference.
>
> , the buddy
>> list is part of a shell script with your user names, messaging is 
>> talk  or irc,
>
> Messaging linked to status on a buddy list is totally different to 
> having to put in a name of somebody that you have first had to who to 
> see if they will chat by opening up a chat window.  Going to an IRC 
> server is even further from this.

>
> Quentin
jeremy hunsinger
jhuns at vt.edu
on the ibook
www.cddc.vt.edu
www.cddc.vt.edu/jeremy
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