Hawai'i Tech
Staying connected

By Jean Chow
Advertiser Staff Writer

Illustration by Jon Orque • The Honolulu Advertiser

Slam!

A door shuts and just like that, he's gone, before you've even finished asking your question.

But instead of getting angry, you just think, "Doh!" because it wasn't really a matter of someone walking out on you. It was more like you didn't type fast enough.

Such are the everyday joys of instant messaging, those little window-within-a-window e-mail-like feature that allow friends to chat back and forth almost, but not quite, in real time.

If you're reading this and going "huh?" because you've never heard of instant messaging (popularly known as IM), where have you been?

Chances are, not on a college campus.

With free instant messaging programs available for download all over the Internet, more and more people everywhere are getting hooked up — a recent article on usnews.com reported that more than 60 million people worldwide are regular instant messaging users.

Take a stroll through any college dorm and you'll be in hard-core IM country, among people who think instant messaging is a way of life.

Now that most colleges offer Ethernet connections that provide always-on super-fast Internet access (without the hassles of logging on, as with dialup connections), many students often leave their IM programs running whenever their computers are on. A quick inspection of a typical "buddy list" reveals that some people have been logged on for over three days!

"I'm online all the time," said Christine Yokoyama, who just finished her freshman year at the University of California-San Diego. "I turn AIM on when I wake up and sign off when I go to sleep at night."

AIM, or America Online Instant Messenger, is one of the more popular instant messaging programs, along with ICQ (also owned by AOL), Microsoft's Explorer Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger. These programs are helping to keep people connected.

Each program allows registered users to maintain a buddy list of people they communicate with often: friends, family, co-workers, etc. This feature alerts you when a buddy signs on or off (accompanied on AIM by sounds of doors opening and closing) and may offer other details, depending on the program, such as how long a user has been online or the user's personal profile.

When a user sees that a buddy is online, he can send an instant message, or IM, which opens up a small window that both people can see. The window has two sections, a place to type text and a place where all the sent text can be read. In this way, messages are exchanged much like e-mail, but without the delay. According to the same usnews.com article, the research firm IDC (International Data Corp.) estimates that users sent about 900 million instant messages on a typical day last year.

A challenge of IM is to type as fast as you can talk — and keep up with the other person who is doing the same. Two users often end up "tripping" over one another as message after message is sent, resulting in a haphazard dialogue only the two chatters would be able to follow.

On the other hand, because IM is so fast, users tend to get pretty impatient if an answer doesn't shoot back in nanoseconds.

"I type really fast and when the person takes a while (to respond), I'm just like, 'OK, hurry up,'" said Jordan Lee, who just finished his freshman year at Stanford University. "I think when you talk (on the phone), you're OK with a short delay, but when you're typing, you forget that the person might not be there or may be doing something else."

In addition to chatting, many instant messaging programs also include features such as creating private chat rooms for more than two friends at a time, sharing Web links and exchanging pictures, music and other files. With a sound card, microphone and speakers, MSN's Explorer program even provides a user the ability to talk with another Explorer user as he would on the phone.

"It's so convenient; it's opened my eyes to the wonders of the Internet," Yokoyama said with a laugh. "Before college, I never even used to go online."

Just a few years ago, kids who were starting college promised to stay connected via e-mail.

"I don't think instant messaging was even around (when I left for college)," said Stephanie Lum, a '98 graduate of Seattle University. "E-mail was available, though, and I used that to keep in touch with my friends at home or who went to other colleges on the Mainland."

Nowadays, parting words are more along the lines of "just IM me!"

"At college, I use ... (IM) every day; half the time I'm talking to my high school friends," Lee said. "It helps me keep in touch with people because it's interactive and easier for me to type than to call someone to talk — and it's cheaper."

The cheapness (OK, free-ness) and convenience of the programs play a big role in their popularity. Parents, too, often rely on IM as a means of communicating with their children away from home.

"I still talk to my dad on the phone maybe once a week, and he e-mails me a lot, but sometimes we just IM," Yokoyama said.

Lee and Yokoyama, like many other students, admit that they even chat with people who live just down or across the hall in their dorms. "It's funny," Lee said. "Usually, it's just to see if they're around. The other half of the time I'm talking nonsense to my friends here or making plans to do something."

Most college students agree that instant messaging can be addicting. While chatting can be fun, it is also time-consuming and sometimes distracting.

"When I'm doing homework or writing a paper, I'll sign off because it's right there on the same screen," Yokoyama said. "But after (my work is done), I'll talk online for a couple of hours before I go to sleep."

For the IM-er who doesn't want to miss anything important, however, most programs include blocking features, which let a person designate whose messages can't get through.

AIM also features an Away message function, which can be set to automatically respond to an incoming message with something along the lines of "out of town, try again later" — kind of like an online answering machine. One student said that she even IMs her own roommate, using that method to record phone messages instead of writing them down.

So with IM permeating the daily lives of college students, is this the future of communication between these kids and the rest of the world?

Nah, said Yokoyama. "IM is always there, you can always get those. But getting a phone call or real mail is still the best because those are more rare."