The character, functions, and styles of instant messaging in the workplace

Abstract

Current perceptions of Instant Messaging (IM) use are based primarily on self-report studies. We logged thousands of (mostly) workplace IM conversations and evaluated their conversational characteristics and functions. Contrary to prior research, we found that the primary use of workplace IM was for complex work discussions. Only 28% of conversations were simple, single-purpose interactions and only 31% were about scheduling or coordination. Moreover, people rarely switched from IM to another medium when the conversation got complex. We found evidence of two distinct styles of use. Heavy IM users and frequent IM partners mainly used it to work together: to discuss a broad range of topics via many fastpaced interactions per day, each with many short turns and much threading and multitasking. Light users and infrequent pairs mainly used IM to coordinate: for scheduling, via fewer conversations per day that were shorter, slower-paced with less threading and multitasking.

Supporting Reflection in Software Development with Everyday Working Tools

“…The informal communication is likely to be reflected in other tools, e.g. instant messaging tools [ 28,51 ] . Other lightweight project management tools, e.g.…”

“…Formal communication, for which archiving is important, may for instance be conducted over email [ 27 ] and informal communication, e.g. about ongoing work, by synchronous [ 16,28 ] and asynchronous chat. A shared workspace to hold artifacts under development must be provided, as well as ways of providing co-workers with workspace awareness [29][30][31] , including social awareness [ 32 ] .…”

Security Enhancement by Detecting Network Address Translation Based on Instant Messaging

“…Some enterprises also provide private instant messaging services for business purposes. The characters of real-time communication and presence awareness led to its acceptance as the third popularity Internet application following Email and Web [13]. As an evolving technology, instant messaging is attracting researches in the related research topics.…”

Designing a large-scale video chat application

“…If the video switches to a person as they start to type, the video channel might improve coordination, serving the same function as the "X is typing" feedback implemented in popular IM applications [14,21]. However, we reasoned that watching people type could be tedious, and was unlikely to include much emotional communication, as most users would have their attention focused on the keyboard while typing.…”

“…Despite being viewed as a 'media-poor' [25] form of collaboration, text-based systems continue to offer users several advantages. For example, they support a nice balance of both synchronous and asynchronous communication [11] and have shown to be effective for supporting unplanned, informal communication [14]. For these and other reasons, multimedia conferencing applications, such as Alkit Confero [1] and Marratech Pro [18], have been developed that give users the option of communicating via text chat, instead of only providing them with an audio channel.…”