[Air-l] What is Instant Messaging

[Quentin (Gad) Jones]

Karim R. Lakhani wrote:
> it announced when users of interest logged on etc.  I started using ICQ 
> in the Summer of 1998 and saw it as Zephyr on Steroids living in the 
> Windows Internet World.  

 From all the articles I have read Zephyr did not have anything like a 
simple pop up list that showed a list of buddies at one time that could 
be kept up as a peripheral awareness display which showed online status 
of users.  If this is incorrect could you direct me to a source where I 
could read more, and see what the user interface looked like.  This is 
the type of stuff we are starting to teach at NJIT.  I have access to a 
great compilation video going back 30+ years showing what windowing and 
scrolling looked like and there is a lot to be learnt from it.  Nothing 
like that appears to exist for IM features.

Just to make it clear how important a feature peripheral awareness is a 
a distinct function I would recommend (UNFORTUNATELY :-) looking at a 
recent CSCW paper on a new Microsoft product.

Designing and Deploying an Information Awareness Interface.   JJ Cadiz, 
Gina Danielle Venolia, Gavin Jancke, and Anoop Gupta.  Proceedings of 
the 2002 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2002).
ftp://ftp.research.microsoft.com/pub/tr/tr-2002-87.pdf

While it of course ignores all commercial IM efforts other than 
Microsoft's it does review the literature quite well.

Quentin