chatting

The most difficult part of this exercise was remembering my AIM password -- I hadn't been on it for years, but did eventually remember it. These days, I mostly use jabber (sometimes through gtalk) and irc for a few specific channels. I was surprised to find a few people from my old buddy list logged in, and chatted with a few library people as well.

I am a big fan of online chatting and have used it for work for, well, as long as I have worked. I find it to be a great way to unintrusively ask questions and have asynchronous and multi-threaded conversations. If you keep logs of your chats (which some clients will do automatically) you can also search them later.

Online chatting was very useful while our department was split between two areas, and now helps us avoid the temptation to shout across the room to each other when we have questions. I have installed a jabber client on our student computers, and plan to create (and lurk in) a chatroom where our student workers can report problems and ask questions.