We recently relocated our offices. Our new mailing address is:
Liquid Communication Systems, LLC
133 Fayetteville Street
Suite 210
Raleigh, NC 27601
Our phone number and all other contact information will remain the same. Using our online form is the best way to contact Liquid.
The manila folder seems to always hold something timely and important. On one hand they are used by private investigators to reveal damaging information to clients. I bet Spitzer got one. On the other the folder is used by corporations to circulate important information. Stashed inside the manila folder the memo’s slow path is always the same.
Read memo. Spill coffee on it. Misplace for day. Sign. Pass. Repeat.
Effusia Business Messenger updates this slow distribution network with the memo message. Now users can send memos with Effusia to select individuals or complete groups of employees. Either select My Effusia>Contacts>Send Memo Message to choose individuals or right click on a group (or individual) in the console contact window and select Send Memo Message to send to the whole group (or individual). If the sender sends as Blind instead of Normal all recipients are BCC (blind carbon copy). Regardless of connection status users will receive the message immediately if logged in or as an offline message that appears upon logon to Effusia. And recipients can reply, reply all or forward the message too. Now everyone can be updated simultaneously without waiting for the dreaded manila envelope to make all the rounds through the office.
I hope the next manila folder that reaches my desk is not filled with phone bills or 8×10 glossies but instead has one of those new skinny Apple MacBook Air laptops. And yes Effusia is secure and runs on Mac OSX. But it can’t tell if you are being tailed.
I’ve not used the official AIM client in many years so I haven’t kept up with all its latest features and bloat. The last time I used it, the ads, extra annoying graphics, animations and sounds were just too much of a distraction to make it useful for real and serious communication. This week I spotted that they have included yet another feature that is also more annoying than useful: real-time IM.
“Real-time” meaning as you type ‘a’ they see an ‘a’. I don’t see this feature adding any value unless you are looking to get yourself in trouble. I wouldn’t want to count how many times I have typed things I never intended to send in a heated discussion or how many zillion words I have misspelled until the built in spell checking caught it for me. Everyone would see how terrible of a speller I really am. (Yes, many already know, but I like to keep it as secret as I can.) Having that little bit of a buffer there is the only room you have to proof read an already quick, stream of thought communication medium. How frustrating is it going to be on the recipients end too watching you type, delete, type, type, delete, type, delete, type?
I do see the value in knowing that the other person is typing though. A typing indicator is a feature that has been in many IM clients, Effusia included, for as long as I can remember. It is good to know the person on the other end of your conversation is paying attention to you and still in the conversation but real-time IM is just more bloat. Leave it to public IM clients who cater to teenagers to just keep adding more useless features like this.
So in partnership a partnership with Yahoo and RIM, Jet Blue plans to offer wireless access on their flights. So will this increase productivity and help others pass the time on a coast to coast flight or be a bigger annoyance? I cannot imagine sitting next to someone who is yapping on their Skype the whole trip. And many people that don’t normally bring a laptop aboard now would probably do so now that internet is available. Get ready for your aisle-mate surfing more YouTube and MySpace. There are no cubicle walls to shield you from someone else’s glaring laptop screen for hours on end. For me a flight is my rare chance to catch up on some reading or doing a crossword. Heck, maybe even carry on a conversation. I get enough daily internet intake to tide me over for an 3 hour internetless flight.
With that said we all know it that in-flight internet will be a reality soon. Regardless, I think internet in the Friendly Skies should be limited to business class. It would give fliers a choice as to their need for in-flight internet or not. If you allow it in coach then you can add bad digital manners to the already long list of potential nightmare flying personalities.
Just don’t forget to bring a great book for those multi-hour tarmac delays!
A few months ago there was an article that really caught my eye and I am finally getting around to blogging about it. The US Senate was working on a bill that would retroactively grant immunity to e-mail providers, search engines, Internet service providers and instant-messaging services. Yes, you read that right. Those IMs that you might be sending over the Internet are, and always have been, out in the open. Now the federal government wants direct access to them from your public IM service, no questions asked and regardless of the legality of the request.
Granting public IM services immunity removes the company’s accountability over the privacy of the information you are sending through their network. A request not signed by a judge may just be a request from some government employee abusing the system. Such was the case when Benjamin Robinson, a Departmet of Commerce special agent, used a Department of Homeland Security database to stalk his former girlfriend. How long before we have federal employees committing identity theft, bribery, or any number of crimes with the sensitive data they received from the public IM service you use? It may be going on already since all they had to do was ask.
So if you are still using a public IM system for your company’s internal messaging (and I truly hope you are not), make sure you are not sending out personal information about yourself, others in the company and especially not your own customers. Also, if you are using secure internal IM already, like Effusia, make sure any IM traffic going outside of your network is encrypted by enabling SSL. If you aren’t sure or aren’t sure how to do that, feel free to ask us.
When we started Liquid in 2001, instant messaging was still a relatively new phenomenon in most office environments. At the time there was much debate in the IT press as well as mainstream media as to whether the inevitable introduction of IM corporate life would help or hurt productivity. As we began to talk with potential customers about Effusia, many managers we spoke with were excited about the potential of the technology but several maintained serious reservations. Of this (generally hardcore) minority, one of the most common concerns was the perceived “interruptiveness” of IM; the feeling being that workers would not be able to complete “real” tasks without having to stop every five minutes to attend to some distracting and unwanted flashing window.
Six years on from these initial conversations, our experiences has been that the fear of IM interruption has decreased dramatically as managers have come around to the idea that the benefits gained from instant communication generally outweigh the downsides. Now, a new paper titled IM=Interruption Management? Instant Messaging and Disruption in the Workplace published in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication by R. Kelly Garrett from Ohio State and James N. Danziger from UC Irvine casts some academic light on our anecdotal experience of the last several years.
Garrett and Danziger surveyed 912 people who fit their criteria of “computer-using workers” to find out more about how they use (and perceive) IM in the workplace. Their main hypothesis was the somewhat counterintuitive idea that IM users would actually report feeling less interrupted. Turns out, it seems this is true. Though they found that IM users report having just as much work communication as non-IM users, they actually reported fewer interruptions. This is surprising until one starts to think that maybe the features of IM technologies actually empower people to manage interruptions more easily than with other technologies. The authors provide some insight into scenarios we’ve all experienced as IM users:
Nardi and her colleagues (2000) suggest that IM actually provides increased opportunities for negotiating the timing of interactions. From the sender’s point of view, IM provides a relatively unobtrusive way to test availability. The sender does not need to be as concerned about when to initiate communication, because he or she knows that the recipient can ignore or dismiss the IM notification easily or can provide an explicit indication of status quickly (e.g., “I’m busy right now. Can we talk in 15 minutes?”). Although an IM pop-up is disruptive, it is not as distracting as an inopportune telephone call or an unexpected office visit.
And also:
…because the presence awareness functionality provided by IM clients is generally quite limited, ignoring an incoming IM is often socially acceptable. Thus IM offers the recipient “plausible deniability” (Nardi et al., 2000, p. 84), because a non-response might simply mean that the person is away from the computer.
As a member of several IM-using organizations, I can say from experience that this “ping” approach is extremely common. Most of my conversations (both started by me and started by someone else) begin with a simple “there?” message. The great thing about the ping is it allows the receiving party to opt-out of the conversation gracefully. It’s perfectly ok to ignore the ping message for a little bit (but not too long) or respond with a “yes, but busy”. It’s a tacit acknowledgment of the fact that the sender’s desired conversation may not be the most important thing the recipient has going at the moment.
Basically, IM affords users the “power to ignore” in a way that other interactions do not. You can’t pretend not to hear an office-mate’s question as they stand in your doorway as that would be considered very rude. I would also venture to say that we’ve been conditioned our entire lives to pick up a ringing phone. Though it may briefly grab your attention, that blinking window in the corner of your screen can be dismissed in a way an uninvited co-worker cannot. Go forth and use the power to ignore, but do it wisely.
Mobility is the key to my productivity. To be able to work on the go without being connected to a desk is my work environment of choice. And as wireless hotspots become ubiquitous and cell advancements continue to cater to more robust applications office space really symbolizes a TPS report in my opinion. Ah, the freedom of working untethered! And working on the go keeps the creative juices flowing. I do not think the mute grey fabric of a cubicle has ever inspired me. Though the meerkat/groundhog response to stimuli in cubefarms inspired me to win the wack-a-mole game at the fair. But winning a stuffed animal is not the point. Those are sewn overseas with lead paint noses.
All these tech developments help the US convert its workforce to compete in services instead of manufacturing. And distributed workforces allow companies to hire the best talent regardless of location. We have a number of clients that use Effusia to connect far-flung employees and multiple offices. The feedback we get is that their productivity and creativity have both increased. And the communication is secure over the public networks. Of course every great productivity tool has its downside. For me work and not work has become a grey area. Vacation now means responding to emails from the beach and voicemails while you are on the chairlift. Still, it is better than sitting in the office staring at your inbox waiting for that critical message to magically appear. Unless of course you are filleting a fish in your cubicle while you wait.
If your business is running Linux, you don’t have many options for internal instant messaging. Of course there are always public systems but those send your company IMs outside of your company’s protected network and over the Internet. That is a serious security risk for your company’s network and more importantly your company’s sensitive information!
Since our initial release over 5 years ago, Effusia has released a version for Linux. Our customer base for the Linux version has unfortunately been small and for the Effusia Console on the desktop, practically non existent. Linux on the Desktop has been slow to take.
Every year seems to be the year of the Linux desktop but this year is even more so. With many users disappointed with Microsoft Vista, companies like Dell selling Linux pre-installed and with great attention given to the desktop user by distributions such as Ubuntu and Fedora, maybe this will be the year.
Recently we have also had more interest from some existing customers for an updated Effusia Console for Linux. I’ve spent a good part of the past week working on that release. Aside from a few little quirks along the way, it is now working beautifully.
Are you running Linux on the desktop? We would love to hear from you and while you are here, download a free trial and let us know what you think of the Effusia Console on Linux.
Welcome all to the Effusia blog. Through this blog we hope to start an open dialogue about instant messaging and technology trends, create a platform to discuss future Effusia feature development and provide users a place to share IM and technology tips that make work environments more fun and/or efficient. Welcome!
Abbreviation Efficiency?
I confess that all the abbreviations used in IM and somewhat in text messaging are baffling to someone as old as me. Heck, I am in my 30’s which is senior citizen status for most IMers. Now that I use it constantly at work and less regularly on a social level I definitely enjoy the immediate gratification it provides. What still gives me pause is all the abbreviations. It saves time from typing all those words but it takes me that much longer to figure out what is actually being said. To brush up on the IMish language I have found a nice little dictionary to refer to whenever I find myself questioning if I should be laughing or offended at a bunch of nonsensical letters strung together. If you find yourself thinking OMGYG2BK, just check out this IM dictionary to break the code.