{"id":193,"date":"2005-03-26T18:54:00","date_gmt":"2005-03-26T18:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/?p=193"},"modified":"2005-03-26T18:54:00","modified_gmt":"2005-03-26T18:54:00","slug":"imazon-anyone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/?p=193","title":{"rendered":"IMazon, anyone?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Instant messaging is one of those things that many younger web users simply can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t image living without. Although it can trace its parentage to the bulletin boards and online services of the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc80s and early \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc90s, it only really emerged as a distinct entity in it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s own right a little under ten years ago when four Israeli programmers released ICQ<\/a> to an unsuspecting world. Before long, other pretenders for the IM crown appeared, including AIM<\/a>, Yahoo Messenger<\/a> and MSN Messenger<\/a>. Like many, I spend a fair proportion of my days and evenings with one form of instant messenger or another running behind whatever else I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m doing. During work hours, I use Jabber<\/a> and Lotus Sametime<\/a> to talk to my team and colleagues the world over via a secure intranet connection. For family and other folks beyond the firewall and when I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m on my own time, I rely heavily on Trillian<\/a> to hook me into the AOL, Yahoo, MSN and ICQ networks and Skype<\/a> to provide VOIP connectivity when I need it \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and a great job they do too. <\/p>\n

That said, there are folks out there who are pushing and stretching instant messaging, moving away from the established chat, voice, video and ftp stuff and tackling enterprise-style projects. One of these folks is fellow London blogger Riaan van Schoor, whose company Inside C<\/a> is developing Person to Application Messaging (PAMs) solutions. These \u00e2\u20ac\u02dctechnolutions\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 enable the use of IM clients to interact with data sources and websites which normally require portal access. If this sounds a little dry and lacking in fizz, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s one example you can try immediately that might help demonstrate the possibilities. One implementation of Inside Messenger<\/a> lets you search your regional Amazon site from an IM client window with no need to fire up a browser until you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve found the item you want to purchase. <\/p>\n

Rather than take my word for it, fire up AOL or MSN in your favoured IM client and try the following:\n<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Add the following buddies to the relevant contact list:<\/li>\n