The Real Bruce

With all the ways we have to communicate with each other today, has instant messaging become obsolete? I tried to think the other day about the last time I sent an instant message and really couldn’t remember. I think it may have been when I was trying to send a file to a co-worker. I am not even sure that would qualify as a instant message, it would be more of a file transfer using the instant message platform.

I think that is what instant messaging has become, more of a platform than a action. People now use it to video chat, play games, and remotely connect to someone’s desktop. How many of us actually use it to send a message? After all we now have Twitter, Facebook, and texting for that. It seems that  rarely do we need to send a message where we can’t use one of those platforms to do it.

I remember just a few years ago when it was not uncommon to have five or six chat windows open at a time in my MSN Messenger. I would be typing as quick as humanly possible trying to keep up with all the conversations. Now I have so many other avenues to communicate I don’t even really need to have a messenger client installed. I can now chat through Facebook or Gmail just as I used to do on a stand alone application. Now chat is built right in to other tools I use, and available through the browser on any computer I am using.

Are the days of stand alone messenger client over? I am curious as to what you think. I believe they will continue to be used as communicating tools using voice and pictures, however the days of typing for hours on hours to friends or co-workers are a thing of the past.

Leave a comment. When is the last time you used instant messenger to just send a typed message? What is the number one way you communicate today?

Remember the days before social media and search engine optimization? When you would hear that glorious noise of your modem dialing and connecting you with AOL. What good times we had in chat rooms debating our favorite sports team, or checking our email through that clunky interface at the breakneck speed of 28k.

Well our connections may be faster and we may believe we are sophisticated social media experts, but have we come full circle to a AOL type way of thinking? You know a way of thinking where you never search on venture onto a site unless you see the link on Facebook.

Do you still send email through a personal email account or do you just use the clunky Facebook interface? Do you have your own instant message program installed on your computer or is it just more convenient to use Facebooks built in instant messenger?

Next thing you know there will be applications inside Facebook or games and quizzes you can play, that keep you stuck in the Facebook environment. Oh wait, there already are. Next thing you know you will hear people saying my Facebook is down.

The thing that makes the internet great and why breaking out of that AOL shell so many years ago was important is it allowed for individual thought and creativity. Now it seems we are being sucked back into a uniform, sterile online world that limits all of that.

Hopefully this will be as short lived as the AOL dominance, but at least in the mean time I don’t get a busy signal every time I try to connect.