- "At Amerex, he said, the I.M. system is more mission-critical than the phone system."
- "e-mail is woefully inadequate for guaranteed message delivery, and clumsy when it comes to conducting business in real time."
- "All of which means the end could be near for business voice mail, as more and more companies adopt instant messaging."
NYTimes on the rise of IM
Instant
Messaging gets covered in the New York Times yesterday as a key new means of communication in business. I'm
guessing most people reading here already knew that, but the article has a certain charm. Presence status really is
nice. Some of my favorite quotes from the Times:
Reader Comments
(Page 1)2. Thanks for the comment Judith! I think that the role of each of those is changing with the rise of new means of communicating. For me I think that email is more about communication that is least time sensitive and most formal, phone is more emotionally important now that its reserved for when that's really what's needed and face to face is more informed and less frequent.
Posted at 9:31PM on Apr 6th 2006 by Marshall Kirkpatrick
3. IM is vital to running virtual teams.
Posted at 6:37PM on Apr 7th 2006 by webmetricsguru
5. That New York Times! Always on the cutting edge of technology! (Tongue lodged firmly in cheek.)
Posted at 4:51PM on Apr 10th 2006 by carole mcmanus
6. Thanks for the pointer, Marshall. Couldn't the Times find better examples than Sun and IBM? Those are hardly technologically average companies. I can't use this article to encourage a colleague to start using IM, especially at a nonprofit.
Oh well, NYT disappoints again...
Posted at 4:47PM on Apr 11th 2006 by Ruby Sinreich
7. That's a good point Ruby. I know that it sometimes feels there are too few non-tech companies blogging to provide enough examples. So too with IM.
Do other readers here have favorite non-tech or non-profit examples of organizations who love IM?
Posted at 4:54PM on Apr 11th 2006 by Marshall Kirkpatrick
8. Ruby and Marshall, I don't know about "loving" IM, but I was on a task force last year for a small non-profit organization, and we all appreciated being able to have meetings from our desks. We were scattered across the state, and nobody had to leave work to travel to a meeting place; we all just logged in at the appointed time and met. We used AIM for the sake of convenience.
Posted at 4:09PM on Apr 12th 2006 by Laura Botts
1. IM is my mainstay of daily communication but ... email, telephone, and face-to-face definitely have their place ... still - IM rules in a 12-18 hour blast of continuous partial attention interactions with an average of 150-200 people/day.
Posted at 9:27PM on Apr 6th 2006 by judith