I Me Mine

Thing Five: Online chat

I've set up my Meebo account. On the settings I enabled IM history just cause it says history but I don't really know what that means. I noticed there is an option to only receive messages from friends which I will activate if there turns out to be spam. I also changed the window background color to purple.

I then turned my procrastinating self to trying to set up a chat with my mentor Amy. It took some doing trying to find a time factoring in the time difference between Williamsburg and California. This could be a problem. Our users at work are either in California or they're in Japan or Europe. Email works well with Japan and Europe for collaboration because you each are working on your part of the project be it a report or research when the other is asleep and then you send it at the end of your day so it is ready for them at the beginning of theirs. Very time effective. Anyway, chat would not work in those cases. And the folks in California just pick up the phone when it's too much back and forth for email.

(Having my chat right now... the mystery is why is Meebo showing my buddy as offline when she is obviously online.)

Our assignment asks about previous chat experience. Once, long ago, someone in our group at work tried to get us all on the AOL IM thing. He set us all up with the software and usernames and everything. He was the only one we ever contacted using it. Our biggest problem with it was the lack of a record. Maybe it was just us archivists (he was in the database side of the shop) but we hated being without a record of what had been asked and agreed. It worked to his advantage 'cause he could deny that he said he would trek down to our basement lair soon to check on that problem we were asking about. Anyway, maybe the IM history setting that I mention in my first paragraph solves that issue. Having a history did not exist back then. Imagine, archivists with no history! Think I'll go play with the IM history thing, see what that is about.