jeremy hunsinger wrote:
a problem is that online awareness is the unix command who
A who command is totally different to having a series of names constantly displayed with different colours and icons to signify status. There is a huge amount of HCI research to support this as a fundamental difference. , the buddy
list is part of a shell script with your user names, messaging is talk or irc,
Messaging linked to status on a buddy list is totally different to having to put in a name of somebody that you have first had to who to see if they will chat by opening up a chat window. Going to an IRC server is even further from this. Quentin
****************** The U.S. patent office has approved the ICQ inventors' patent on their technology for instant messaging via the Internet, HA'ARETZ reported. The office also granted a patent on the entrepreneurs' technology for the transmission of instant messages over cellular networks. America Online, which bought ICQ with its owner Mirabilis in 1998 for $400 million, can file patent infringement suits against Yahoo! and Microsoft which develop and market similar software for the transmission of instant messages, or, alternatively, can demand the companies pay royalties. An estimated 400 million people worldwide use instant messaging, about 135 million of them ICQ users. ******************
While the patent office often gets things wrong (e.g. the hoo ha about Amazon.com's one click patent) this approval does suggest that IM=(online awareness + buddy list + over TCP/IP protocal + messaging) and is something relatively new.
Quentin
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