Web Worker Daily

Instant Messaging (IM) is a key part of every workday for many web workers, but I’ve noticed that many people don’t take advantage of new features and offerings in the IM space that have arisen as the technology has evolved. From ways to secure IM sessions, to extensive added features in the newer universal IM clients, you can probably be doing much more with your instant messaging sessions.

On top of that, the lines between instant messaging clients and products designed for rich media collaboration, conveniences such as voice mail, and remote control are beginning to blur. You can easily add remote dekstop control and virtual meetings to your Mac or Windows IM arsenal for free. In this post, I’ll run through some surefire ways to energize your IM sessions.

Leverage the Power of the Uber-IM Clients. There are now many IM clients that support most of the traditional IM clients and protocols and give you more features than you get by using them on their own, including Trillian and Miranda on the Windows platform, and Adium for Mac OS X.

The multi-protocol IM clients can keep you connected to people on nearly every other instant messaging platform, from AIM to Jabber to Google Talk and ICQ. Moreover, they are not first-generation products anymore and offer many unusual extras. Miranda, for example, has a nice library of useful plug-ins you can use with it, and they’re even ranked by which ones are most popular.

Use the Add-Ins. Many of the popular instant messaging clients offer free add-ins that you can load to keep track of history in your IM conversations and even divide your conversations into threads. Miranda, for example, offers one called History ++ (2in1), which has a ton of useful features. It lets you export threads to HTML, view separate conversations concurrently in a tree view, and you can search your message history by contacts or types of messages. Trillian has a lot of useful ones too, including Good News, which is a useful RSS news feed plug-in. The home page for your IM client probably has a tab called Add-ins, Plug-Ins or Downloads. Keep track of what’s posted there.

Users of Apple’s iChat can also get many useful third-party add-ins. Chax is one of the very best ones, allowing you to auto-accept IM sessions, and customize how your sessions are conducted.

Investigate Encryption and Security Tools for Your IMs. Instant messages are a very common and easy medium for displaying information to the world that you don’t want them to see. Just leave a computer on with your IM client on, step away for a few minutes, and who knows what somebody walking by your computer may see.

Especially if you exchange sensitive information during IM sessions, investigate some of the cool ways to stay secure. A small workgroup, for example, might co-adopt the Pidgin IM client. You can get a very flexible plug-in for it called Pidgin-Encryption which lets you and your team exchange RSA encrypted IMs. BitWise is also popular for encrypted instant messaging, and runs on the Mac, Windows or Linux. Zone Alarm’s IMSecure is also a free IM tool that is well respected for its security features. It works with the universal clients, such as Trillian.

Share Desktops and Collaborate with IM. The line is starting to blur between instant messaging applications, virtual meeting applications and remote control software. Windows and Mac users will be impressed by Yugma for virtual meetings, sharing desktops back-and-forth while instant messaging, whiteboarding and more. It’s completely free, even for sessions involving up to 10 meeting participants, and usually gets a swoon out of people who try it. Yugma is Java-based, and it makes it easy to just tell a friend to hop on with you while you chat and show things to each other on both of your desktops.

Windows users will also appreciate Interact Remote which is also free and nicely marries remote control and instant messaging so that you and your IM partner can share desktops. Microsoft also has instructions online for easy Windows remote control sessions from within Windows Messenger.

Consider Google Talk if You Use VoIP and GMail. Lots of web workers are big users of VoIP and GMail, and Google Talk is often their best friend in the IM world. The VoIP and voice mail features in Google Talk are very handy and respected, and it offers GMail notifications. Trillian also offers very good GMail alerts.

Break Out of the Text Stranglehold. Many of the IM clients now offer video, audio, VoIP and other rich media features. However, some of the tools available for free that specialize in rich media are best to go with, and can really supercharge your collaboration sessions with a remote person. My favorite of these free tools is SightSpeed which has deservedly won many awards for best voice and video calling.

With SightSpeed you’ll find outstanding, 30 frames-per-second video on video calls, and very clear audio. You can also use it to post recorded video content—even something you might throw together on the fly with a camera phone—and share it with others by IMing or e-mailing them a link to your post. You can use it on the Mac or Windows, and it’s great for adding video to blogs.

Do you have any instant messaging, virtual meeting or collaboration tips?