The latest way to get interrupted when you’re really trying to get some work done is by instant Internet messages. For years AOL fans have known that the best way to annoy friends and enemies online is to send an instant message. A brief note appears immediately as a dialog box in the center of the recipient screen, rendering the rest of the service unusable until the message is read and clicked away. This charming technology has now arrived on the public Internet.
There are several major players in the instant-message arena. American Online’s Instant Messenger is the brand leader and companies like Ubique and iChat offer competing products. The leading such program among netizens is Maribilis’s ICQ, a program that sits in the top-right hand of your screen (just like the DOS-era Sidekick, for you old-timers), either increasing your productivity or wasting your day. Once technical issues are put aside (we know one International Data Corp. analyst who claims that ICQ “kept crashing my machine and even worse, it turned my Pentium into a 286 with no hard disk.”), ICQ can be customized to receive instant messages only from those you identify in advance. That functionality is crucial: Your ICQ number only accepts instant messages from known entities. An elegant wizard interface lets you add people to your list of acceptable correspondents and get yourself added to the lists of friends and colleagues.
However, the experience of using ICQ is less than thrilling for anyone with pretensions of productivity. When ICQ loads, it announces itself with a sound that resembles a damaged ferry crashing into a dock. It also places a dynamic flower icon in the Windows icon tray, which changes color when the ICQ server is temporarily unattached, something that happens only a half dozen times during a normal work day. We’ve seen ICQ used most effectivly as a coordination method for project teams. One-to-one ICQ communication is a bit pointless–we all have email–but ICQ lets a group of people synchronize their distribution lists and keep one another up-to-date. This is again something that can be done via email just as easily, unless your company has one of those firewalls that keeps outside messages running in circles for a few hours before they can sneak into the cc:Mail server.
We tried using ICQ for a project in which people from three companies had to coordinate their work and soon gave up on all their “gotcha” and “OK, consider it done” messages, returning to the greater functionality of email. By removing ICQ from our systems, we were able to ecrease our interruptions at work from 30 times and hour to 20. That’s still about 19 too many, but it’s a step in the right direction.
