Jabber mehttp://norman.walsh.name/2007/08/01/jabber10762007-08-01T18:20:04-04:00$Date$NormanWalsh2007Norman WalshI find that IM strikes a nearly perfect balance between the latency
of email and the invasiveness of a phone call. And I think Russell is right,
jabber is the way to go.DorothyNevillThe real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the
right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting
moment.For years (maybe decades), email has been my preferred
communication vehicle for most purposes. If you send me email on an average
day, I'll see it within a few minutes. (I may not answer it for hours, days,
weeks, … well, you get the picture, but that's a different issue.)What's important to me is, your email won't interrupt my
debugging session or my conference call or my attempt to think deep
thoughts.But sometimes a lag of even tens of minutes is too long.
Sometimes my friends and colleagues need information (or need to know
if I have the information they need) right now.
That's the perfect case for IM.
If you send me an IM, I'll see it in a
few seconds. But if I'm deep in debugging, I can still ignore you for
a few tens of seconds.If you call me on the phone, you're demanding all of my
attention right now. Debugging context: gone; conference call:
missed; deep thoughts: evaporated. That's fine, if you really need all
of my attention this minute, of course. But how often is that?
I'm just not that important.Conversely, I know my friends and colleagues are busy. “Do you
have any items for the agenda for tomorrow's meeting?” is a question I
would like answered in the next few minutes, but I don't think it
requires interrupting you with a phone call.That's a long-winded way of saying I quite like IM. Via
TimBray,
I found that
RussellBeattie
is
blogging
again (Welcome back, Russell!)One of the first of his new posts that I read was
I
Am Jabber Powered! in which he argues for
using Jabber.
Convincingly I think. (He's also
trying out Mercurial, coincidentally.)Anyway, henceforth, my preferred IM ID is this one:
ndw@im.nwalsh.com via Jabber.