Category: Musings

I’m intrigued by different levels of instant messaging uptake in corporate culture. I acknowledge up front that constant mixed-initiative interruptions to ones workflow can be harmful, but note that many people in low or no-IM work cultures have their pop up mail notifiers enabled to the same effect. In fact despite its fundamentally asynchronous purpose, due to most people’s evolved expectations about instaneous responses to electronic communications, email ends up being overloaded as a poor-man’s IM system, which should never happen. Most emails aren’t important, and anything really urgent should be a phone call, walk-by or IM, because one shouldn’t reasonably expect someone to read your email in the next 5 minutes.

At IBM, where IM is practically the pulse of the company and “pinged” has become a verb meaning to contact via Sametime (due to its annoying ping noise), I used to productively work with people across the country, and even the globe via IM that I never met and only rarely talked to. I would never have thought that there really are companies out there that get by without centralized IM, in which you can reasonably expect to get a hold of anyone in the corporate directory via IM.

Turns out there are – at my current job, which still has its small company culture less than 6 months after being aquired by Oracle, there is no real use of IM ( despite Oracle having a centralized IM system, which I’ve heard is quite busy in “mainline” Oracle, many people on my team don’t bother to sign in there ). – sure there are isolated pockets of instant messaging via Yahoo or AOL, but if you or the person one needs to reach are not there, then its back to email. New hires also incur a cost of gathering up everyones screennames. Or walking to their office, and while I’m all for face to face interaction, an IM can be nice so you at least know person X is going to be in their office when you get there (or just buddy-list awareness if its properly done…)

The differing philosphies behind who one can see as a member of an IM network at IBM vs Oracle are interesting to note. Basically the differences are opt-in vs opt-out. On IBM Sametime, one can see the status of and contact any user who hasn’t specifically chosen to block/hide from you. On Oracle RTC, based on Jabber (which allows any jabber client to connect), one is required to send each person who is not in one’s immediate department a message to request that person allow you to see his or her online status and message him or her. So to accrue one’s O(n²) network effect, you have to exchange n² messages. That just seems silly in a corporation where everyone should be working towards some version of the same goal, playing by the same rules (and to enforce proper behavior, ultimately accountable to the same HR dept). At least both of these approches enforce reciprocity- if I don’t want you to seem me, I can’t see you. I’m not a fan of the (somewhat) recent “innovation” in AIM of being invisible.

Like most things, I really miss having a “real” IM system available at work. Let’s count the ways:

• Knowing when someone gets to work without having to walk by their office a gazillion times
• Leaving messages with people who aren’t in their offices or who are busy at the time a visit is attempted
• Productive (and often not-so-productive) back channel conversations on meetings in person (also requires laptop/wireless culture)
• Quick questions that won’t take long to answer
• The list goes on..

A healthy blend of all kinds of collaboration is a good thing. Given that free servers (like Jabber) are available, I personally couldn’t imagine letting a company grow beyond 10 people without a central directory and IM service.

I suppose there must be a size n where for companies that reach a size greater than n, there is always some part of the company with its head crammed firmly up its ass, in spite of the ground breaking work happening elsewhere. Apparently Yahoo is at least as big as that magical size.
Tonight, I wanted to check out the new weezer video on yahoo music. Only for a mac user, that generates a pop up indicating that Netscape 4.7 is required (screenshot here) That’s a positively pre-historic browser version – it’s eight years old for crying out loud. That would be like steaming down the “information superhighway” with a Victrola on the dashboard of my buggy, whip in hand.

This goes to spite the post I was formulating in my head praising Yahoo Farechase and the new Yahoo Maps Beta (which is arguably better than google maps, for now due to cool hover effects, multiple directions, and route numbers for rural roads in directions).

Then again, since I know Yahoo bought farechase, along with their new beta email (which i doubt beats gmail, because the tired old desktop email metaphor that everyone copies is not better) it may just be that “old” yahoo is stuck in some kind of 1999 time warp, and they have to buy innovation (like Flickr, for example) rather than cook it at home.

Or maybe the Yahoo music team is too busy “innovating” ways to break tools people create to get their content to get around to making it available in contemporary browsers.

Ugh, I lost my keys the other day, including my car key, remote, and house keys. Cost to replace house key, twice – $3 (including labor). Cost to replace car key, because it has a “chip” in it: $24 for the key, $44 for the labor to cut the key and hook a computer up to the car to tell it to start when it sees the new master key. I’m at least as much for progress as the next guy, but seriously, this shouldn’t cost this much.
Anyways, in the hopes that my keys will reappear (I lost them somewhere between my car and kickball, no more than a couple hundred yards) I went ahead and postered the immediate neighborhood So we’ll see if anything comes of that.