Are we seeing a resurgence in Instant Messaging? I think so. Applications like Jaiku which allows you to communicate with it using IM have, I feel, introduced IM to many users for the first time. Various social networking applications now incorporate the notion of a "presence" which allow users to see who is currently online (as apposed to email where you don’t know it the recipient is currently ‘present’) in much the same way as IM does. GMail supports IM via its Google Talk client. More and more people are seeing the benefits of IM over email, which include:
- instant communication
- less email noise
- group conversations
Here at Tipperary Institute I have seen more IM users coming online on the back of Jaiku’s IM support. The client of choice seems to be Pidgin.