Effusia Blog

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.

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.