Why I Quit AIMing

Hello Grandma!

I heard you won't be up for graduation this weekend! It's just as well for me that way, I'd rather have you come visit some time this summer when everything is well. We can go to Korean House to celebrate, it's a very nice restaurant only two minutes from my home.

I've been meaning to call you but your phone is very busy. The internet really simplifies communication so much I can't imagine how anyone would maintain a business using a phone with only one line. In fact I don't think I have much need for a phone at all these days!

Only a handful of people left who are nostalgic enough to contact me in this way :) I have been speaking with a girl from Argentina and a fellow from Taiwan both using MSN Messenger. Or typing back and forth with webcams anyway... I find it's much more enriching to have a conversation with a live face, regardless of the other linguistic media that you may have in play.

Juozas is back at home in Lithuania, living with his girlfriend Akvile. I don't know to what degree they have "merged stuff," so to speak, but from the looks of things they are very happy together! He's got a nice apartment and it is clean and well-decorated. We're moving up in the world, no longer do we need newspapers to cover up our messes!

I think I will have a hard time convincing him to move back to Rochester, really I think he's served his time at Microsoft and is again back in touch by means of the web, and it might stay that way. I meant to leave a webcam with you last time we visited, but I think it has migrated back to my office at RIT. I'm afraid I might not be a very good Internet salesman, these things are really not very complicated if you don't make it so.

It's one thing to use the Internet as a tool to maintain contact, but remember that I've grown up in the brave new world where you can actually meet for the first time and initiate a relationship that way! I am a big fan of this and for anyone who hasn't had the experience I think that you are missing the boat entirely!

In case you want to try out some of these tools on your own, there are two major services that are any good for this sort of chat that you should definitely know about. One is called Skype, and the other is MSN or Windows Live Messenger. This is truly a market with lots of competition but nothing else is so outstanding that I would recommend it to a new user.

People on Skype tend to be more outgoing than MSN; I filled out a basic profile and I have had a number of "hits," meeting and speaking for the first time with people from anywhere in the world like I just bumped into them on the street. Windows Live is another service altogether; this is a more cohesive service with better software in my opinion than Skype, but in the words of Clement Chan, "White people don't use MSN." Which is great for me, the compulsive language learner!

To contrast I have not made one single new contact by directly using MSN in spite of filling out a profile. However I have met a number of people on Skype that prompted me to shift our communications to MSN, on account of it being a better service and more convenient to use. Not good news for the Skype team I'm afraid! But both services are far superior to AOL Instant Messenger. Now how will I convince my friends to switch :)

There's something to be said here about how we maintain a contact list and developing isolated bubbles of friends that effectively can't contact each other directly... to make a long story short mostly everyone in America who decided to participate in the Instant Messaging revolution joined up with AOL Instant Messenger when it first came out.

Today we've all got our accounts and our screen names, and many people use this service as a direct substitute for in-person contact with their closest friends, in spite of it's being easily the worst software on the market!

Compare to your cell phone address book, but then imagine that you wish to change providers. You can only contact these people through AIM because their screen name is a part of the AOL service. Want to get a new provider? Sorry, you'll need new friends also. Those Verizon Wireless commercials just took on a whole new dimension of weird for me and my friends!

Anywho Skype is the competitor in perfect position to repeat the same scheme on a global scale, with a team of smart developers and a great product that is constantly one step ahead of Microsoft. That would be the hot stock to watch today, if it were being publicly traded.

In the mean time, I'll have to be sure you know how to use one of these packages before I can go to Egypt! Skype is truly a much better deal for this purpose than anything the phone or cable companies are selling today.