Paul Humphreys rambles on....

Paul Humphreys rambles on....
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Friday July 14, 2006

Instant messaging

I must admit the idea of chat rooms as a viable communication medium was not something I considered before. We all know about the horror stories of kids meeting nasty types in such public rooms. It was however suggested we setup a lab room for us to all be in and for customers of the labs to pop in with questions. Chris is also in this room and if we are all out and someone asks a question he will let them know we unavailable etc. He also answers a lot of questions for us too. The really cool thing is that over the last few months the room has really taken off. There used to be a core of lab folks in the room but we now have a lot more who regularly join in. It starts in APAC with the Singapore and Australian folks. Then the folks in France, Germany, Sweden and Spain pop in and the Brits as usual one hour later. Some of the folks in the West coast of the USA join us mid afternoon who are on an early shift. The problem was as Chris said the room was not really used for many questions but more general communication between lab folks around the world. Believe me they talk about some very unusual and funny stuff. The danger was any question from a customer would get lost in the volume of traffic especially when you get the overlap in timezones. So we have another room just for such chatter and use this original one for lab questions from our customers. So I consider myself an Instant messaging proponent as long as you sign off when you are unavailable.

( Jul 14 2006, 12:00:01 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

Comments:

"We all know about the horror stories of kids meeting nasty types"

It could happen here.

Well I'm glad you are a convert.

My bug bear is having incompatable IM solutions in use. That is something we should get fixed, and I'm trying to.

Posted by Chris Gerhard on July 14, 2006 at 01:09 AM PDT #