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I would have written this column earlier,
but two things have kept me from my semi-appointed rounds. First off, I was too
busy choosing the right colored duct tape to match my apartment décor, trying
to be a good citizen and all that. (Did anyone else think this was a hoax when
they first heard about what our government was recommending?) And second, I was
having too much fun with wireless AOL Instant Messaging to take the time to
write you all about it.
I haven't seen an application energize this
many people since, well, since the early days of wireless email c1992. Remember
Radiomail? They were one of the early pioneers in providing wide-area
messaging, and I recall sending and receiving messages after going through a
turnpike toll booth (no, not when driving, I was parked on the side of the
road, please give me some credit), only to have a cop stop by and ask me what I
was doing. Ah, those were the days. Who knew from the Internet and dot coms
back then?
Back when I was at CMP the first time
around (as editor of Network Computing), the Radiomail application went through
our staff like wildfire, and soon everyone was emailing each other rather than
doing just about anything else, including paying attention at various meetings
or writing their stories. The level of wireless emails got so bad that at one
point we had to ban carrying the units into meetings so we could get some real
work done.
As a side note, this pervasive
multi-tasking continues apace today: when I was last in my high school
networked classroom, I had great difficult getting my students to pay attention
to my lesson because they were too busy surfing the net for their overnight
CounterStrike ratings and catching up on their emails. This situation will only
get worse as more colleges and schools install wireless networking, and as more
students carry around laptops. At least in my wired classroom I was able to
unplug the Ethernet jacks to get my students to pay attention to me. (It became
a dramatic moment too, but I won't get into that here.)
Anyway, back to the present day. A couple
of us at VARBusiness had received Palm i705s and as an experiment I downloaded
the special wireless AIM software that works on it. I wanted to see how far
things have come in the decade-plus since Radiomail. I was also motivated by
the fact that I have to give a presentation this Monday at our local middle
school on what parents should know about AIM. (If you are in the area and
interested in coming, email me for the details.)
It didn't take too long to install the Palm
client, once I figured out that I also needed to update the Palm OS firmware as
well. (The AIM web site, normally an example of clarity, mentions this in their
FAQs, but they bury the factoid and don't have the link to the firmware readily
available. No big deal, but it would have been nice to know this up front.) It
works pretty much like the desktop AIM client, including being able to view
your buddy lists and insert smiley-faces into your conversations.
I
found the same level of annoying connectivity that I initially had with
Radiomail: the ability for anyone to reach me no matter where I was during the
day. Several of my IMs were received during staff meetings, which began to take
on the same level of rudeness that our early ones at Network Computing did (the
only difference: in the present we don't yet have the level of penetration and
critical mass that we did with the early Radiomail devices). The difference,
though, is a subtle one. Email is a store-and-forward system: you send a message,
wait, and send one back. IM is very much an interactive setup: you are
conversing, in near-real time, with several people, and your correspondents
have a very low tolerance for waiting for your replies. I am not proficient at
Graffiti, the handwriting recognition system for the Palm, so my replies took
longer. All this interacting means the IM application is a lot more intrusive
than plain old wireless email, and your colleagues' tolerance for your
multi-tasking will probably be a lot less.
We at VAR use AIM all the time now that the
bosses are on it, and we have staff spread around the country. It is really a
big time-saver, especially if you have to get a quick question answered. Some of us are better than others about
setting up our away messages (when you are away from your desk you can set the
software to tell your correspondents where or what you are doing, so they don't
get frustrated when they are trying to IM you and you don't respond) and
signing off at night when we leave the office. Having the Palm AIM client means
you never are away you’re your desk: which means you feel more compelled to
answer incoming IMs.
Nevertheless, we adults can't hold a candle
to the kind of usage my teenaged daughter has: IM is clearly her
mission-critical app. She documents her movements and actions so completely on
IM that one could write a book on her schedule and activities just from her
away messages alone.
So I brought the Palm home and had her try
it out. She very quickly was timing the delay in sending messages back and
forth between a regular wired desktop and a second account that she had up and
running on the Palm within a few seconds. (No, I didn't suggest this, but she
is her father's daughter after all.) The average delay was around 5 or 6
seconds, and it wasn't symmetrical, meaning that sending an IM to the wireless
network took longer than receiving one. I didn't have a ready explanation for
that circumstance, but figure it is just one of those wireless network
oddities.
But she didn't extensively test the Palm,
mainly because after a few minutes, she was back on the desktop, typing
furiously to her closest dozen or so friends. She isn't an expert on Graffiti
either, although she did admit that with the Palm keyboard she would probably
have continued to use the wireless version for a bit longer. She did point out
(again without any prompting from me) that having AIM anywhere could get rude
when one was in meetings or with friends, and I agreed with her. It remains to
be seen if I end up carrying the Palm around with me or not.
In the meantime, IM me on what color is
your duct tape.
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David
Strom
Port
Washington, NY
+1
(516) 562-7151
dstrom@cmp.com