IM networks are not just for chatting anymore
There’s one thing I know for sure - instant messaging networks have come a long way over the past few years and the uses that people have thought up for them have progressed beyond mere chatting and LOL’ing.
Here’s two :
Creating link-sharing request networks : I have been approached by people very active on places like Digg and Stumbleupon, asking me to approve them on my IM contact list, and me on theirs. Not really to chat but mainly to digg and stumble their links and they would do the same for me in return. The person with the link would just open a chat window and send the link to everyone in the list with the request “digg / stumble please”.
One guy told me he had 20-30 people in his network all digging and stumbling each other’s work. There’s been a lot of grumbling about how flawed the Digg Shout system is and so people seem to be turning instead towards IM programs to do their own informal “shouts”.
I am not sure if asking someone to digg / stumble your personal posts goes against the TOS of these sites but it’s an interesting concept nevertheless. If you have a weblink you want to instantly get out there, you can quickly ask everyone on your network to digg and stumble it for you.
For such a network to be truly effective though, you would need to have some diggers / stumblers on your list that are at least a bit influential on the sites. Kevin Rose would be a good choice on the Digg side although I seriously doubt he would agree to be on any IM network that I have just described. If you have a lot of contacts who are not so high up in the site’s hierachy then the stumbles and diggs they could do would have a limited effect.
For a list of top diggers, check out this list. For a list of top Stumblers, there are two lists in existence, one here and one here.
An unique twist on the “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” concept.
Controlling web-based services from the PC desktop
I recently posted about this on Geeks Are Sexy with a follow-up today. More and more online services are setting up IM access to their services, sometimes using Twitter as a conduit.
The top ones - Twitter, Facebook (in a kind of roundabout way using Twitter as the middleman), Google Calendar, Remember the Milk and all the major blogging platforms (including Wordpress). Just see my Geeks Are Sexy article for more details.
A lot of them are controlled through IMified which is easy to set up.
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