Richard Nantel

The new Facebook Chat application was installed into my profile when I logged in this morning. I can now chat with any of my Facebook friends who happen to be online and logged in.

That brings the total to three ways I can chat with people through the Web services and software I use on a daily basis:

• Facebook
• Gmail
• Skype

The new Facebook Chat application is bare-bones. Click a little icon to see who’s online, initiate a chat session, type a message, and send. There are no bells and whistles such as file transfers. You can’t add a third person or others to a chat session.

Of everyone at Brandon Hall Research, I was probably the most resistant to using chat in day-to-day work activities. My past experience with IM was that it wasn’t more efficient than e-mail since so many chat sessions turn into long social conversations or brainstorming sessions.

This is going to make me sound square, but I’m slowly coming around to adding a bit of chat in my life. I love being able to see if someone is online, ask a question, get an immediate answer, and move on. Since I want to provide others with this ability, I try to keep logged into Skype and Gmail during the day.

Often, though, the phone starts to ring, the Skype and Gmail chat boxes both pop up, a flood of e-mail comes in, and I just start clicking wildly to set various profiles to “offline.”

I guess you can say I love chat when it gives me what I want but not when I’m providing a service to others. Yes, that’s totally selfish.

I suspect it’s only a question of time before other software I use daily will include proprietary chat features. So, my days will soon be filled with changing the status of my various chat apps to Online, Busy, Away, Offline, Invisible, etc. Perhaps someone will come up with a killer app that changes the status of all of these chat applications with one click of a mouse.

I must be doing a great job. Why else would I receive more than 800 offers of employment via e-mail in a single day? I’m certain that’s more than Steve Jobs, Al Gore, and Warren Buffett get in a month, combined.

The 800+ e-mails that arrived in my in-box yesterday morning contained variations of the following subject lines:

• Become employed today in a respectable international company and reach financial success (no investment required).
• High-paid positions in a large successful company are waiting for talented candidates (no sign-up fees).
• Home-based employment opportunities for talented people. No investment needed, no sign-up fees.

Although I’m careful not to post my Brandon Hall Research e-mail address on the Web, it has been harvested by the worst of the mega spammers. These spammers use cheap but sophisticated mailing software that obscures their IP and e-mail addresses and changes the message dynamically to stay one step ahead of spam filters.

To deal with the onslaught, I’ve had to turn up the level of spam filtering on my e-mail account. No longer are spam messages simply flagged as ***SPAM*** in the subject line. Now, they’re deleted on the mail server before they get to my in-box.

The problem with this solution is that, in the past, one legitimate message in a few hundred would be accidentally flagged as spam. I’d find it a few days later in my spam folder, drowning in a sea of offers for mortgage financing, cheap meds, and lonely girls. Consequently, there’s now a real likelihood that I’ll no longer receive the occasional legitimate e-mail.

It doesn’t look like we’ll be abandoning e-mail any time soon. In fact, more and more mobile devices such as cell phones and PDAs are adding e-mail capability. Spammers have fertile new grounds to invade.

According to a recent article on Information Age titled Productivity Drain,

“…during one 24 hour period in 2007, Postini saw data volumes of e-mail traffic hit 17 terabytes, 93 percent of which was spam. The costs associated with managing such colossal volumes in-house are sky-rocketing, with IT security market analysts at Ferris Research predicting that the global cost of spam in 2007 will double to reach $100 billion.“

I’d love to give up e-mail. It’s clearly the killer app gone bad.

One of the benefits I’m seeing to using social networks for work, learning, and leisure is that messaging is controlled and limited to only my contacts. Whereas increasingly I dread opening my e-mail client to check e-mail, I open Facebook knowing that only people I know will be contacting me.

Some organizations have been blocking their employees’ access to social networks in fear that the networks will negatively affect productivity. It seems to me that these platforms instead provide an effective way to wean ourselves off e-mail, raise our productivity, and reduce expenses related to managing spam.