Module 2 - Chat

I downloaded ICQ to my computer and had brief chats with a number of my fellow learners, but found significant difficulties in getting our timing right. The only time that I was able to get online to chat was during my work lunch breaks, and this often did not work out well for my group of chatters, as they were all around Australia and indeed the world.

I enjoy using chat applications very much, but as I experienced, the biggest problem with them is ensuring that everyone is availble at the same time. It is for this reason that I much prefer using disucssion boards for this purpose, as one can post or read posts at a time that suits the reader, and again respond in their own time. This is one of the downfalls of chat, in that all users must be online at the same time which is not always mutually convenient.

In addition to this, I found that when I was at my desk chatting with my fellow learners, quite often my co-workers would assume that I was working and available, so I was frequently interrupted with work requests, which really throws my train of thought.

The benefits that are offered by chat can be outstanding - it is like a telephone conversation, in that it is real-time. This is very helpful for obtaining quick answers to questions, or to "talk out" and issue that one may be experiencing.

GROUP TASK ~ all students : All students regardless of the chat method and option you chose you must now: Using either ICQ, yahoo chat, Messenger, virtual or webct chat, arrange a discussion with your peers. You may do this in small groups if you like. Talk about which chat service you prefer, and what forms of communication chat is most useful for. Think about the following question: how does the method you are familiar with appear to differ from other chat or messaging such as ICQ, MSN or AIM? Which system do you prefer?

For this task I downloaded and installed ICQ, whereas for chat I normally use Gmail's native chat client, or Skype Chat.

Essentially, all text based chat applications serve the same purpose - to exchange short (or sometimes not so short) text based messages directly between two or more users. With this in mind, the differences between any 2 chat applications are more of a user interface than a functional nature. For this reason, I much prefer Gmail's native chat client, as it is extremely light weight; it has very few bells and whistles, has no external application required (other than a regular web browser) and is accessible on any PC that can access http://mail.google.com/. It serves my needs wonderfully, in that it is quick text based chat. I do not have the need for a rich chat client, like MSN or ICQ, and find it cumbersome, and to be honest, quite ugly. The abundance of colours, flashing text, over the top emoticons all, in my opinion, detract from the core purpose of the application, which is to enable quick chatting.