Trillian
Posted on October 30, 2002 @ 08:43 in Software
I have been seduced by Trillian. Trillian is a free instant messenger (IM) client that gives you access to all major chatservices (AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo and even IRC) through one single interface and so far it's been working brilliantly for me. I never really got instant messaging before, maybe mostly because of the clunky interface and when ICQ introduced those ads in the interface, I immediately uninstalled the whole thing. But now that I know a couple of people that regularly use an instant messenger and now that the interface makes sense, courtesy of Trillian, it somehow seems a much more sensible proposition.
Which reminds me of a conversation I had with someone at the AoIR conference. We talked about how, when we were new to the Net, we explored every possibility to talk to other people, to strangers. We'd join mailinglists, IRC, MUDs, Talkers, etc. just to see who was there, what they were doing and to talk to them. We both had the impression that a lot of our students these days don't want to use the Net in that way. For them the Net is a way to stay in touch and talk to their friends. They don't even seem to surf all that much, really just places where they have to go, like the university website. Instead of seeing the Net as a place to explore and to meet people, it seems they don't want to be confronted with unknown others and they voice concerns about people not being who they really are, being misled or feeling that it's just pointless to talk to someone you don't already know or you most probably can't meet face to face anyway. That way the Net goes from being a global network to an infrastructure that supports local friendships (and I'm pretty sure we can find a correlation here with how mobile phones and texting are used by the people who grew up with them, ie the people now in their teens or early twenties). The most intriguing thing to me though, is that they appear to think or ask of other people to be (or at least present) one single, coherent and persistent identity. When I tell students about my research on identity and gender in a MOO, many tend to keep off, think it's silly and pointless and potentially very harmful. One of the first questions often is if people don't completely lose themselves, lose their real identity in role-playing and that question is always immediately followed by the question if mudding isn't terribly addictive. This is so intriguing to me because it is said we live in a postmodern society, but many students seem to cling to a singular, integrated, Enlightenment ideal of identity.
(One small complaint about Trillian though: the program hijacks all ctrl+shift+key combinations and I need some of those for easy editing of text in the MovableType interface in Internet Explorer. Let's see if I can do something about that in the preferences... Nope, not really. Good idea anyone?)
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another complaint to trillian: i want a damn import function for icq contact list. even micq (text icq) has this feature.
Posted by lok on November 05, 2002 @ 20:03
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Comments and trackbacks have been closed on this site. My apologies.
Since MT-Blacklist inexplicably stopped working I had no other recourse than close comments and trackbacks to stop the spam. I've been meaning to correct this for quite a while, but life got in the way... in a good way I should add.