Tag: IM

With a simple change to your Gmail settings, you can (allegedly) ensure that all of your incriminating Google Chat conversations won't come back to bite you. According to The Atlantic, users can take chats "off the record" by clicking the 'Actions' tab in the chat box and selecting the option from a drop-down menu. If a chat is off the record, the transcript will not be saved or archived by your ...

Despite being a powerful force in the global smartphone market, Nokia has really struggled to capture much of a share in the U.S. Similarly, Yahoo!, once a dominating force in search and other Web services, has quickly became an also-ran. Its e-mail and other Web apps have fallen behind those offered by Google, and its search service has all but been retired, now merely offering re-branded ...

"Get a yellow nylon rope, about eight feet. That is all you need. And look around your apartment for somewhere to hang from. I can help you with the cam when you need to." That's what William Melchert-Dinkel, a 47-year-old nurse from Faribault, Minnesota, told 18-year-old Nadia Kajouji on March 6, 2008. Kajouji, who had been chatting with Melchert-Dinkel online about her suicidal thoughts, went ...

A lot has happened since Windows first launched its Live Messenger instant messaging service 14 years ago. Social networking has expanded digital communication beyond simple text, and smartphone technology has expanded it beyond the computer. In response, then, Windows has decided to revamp Live Messenger in the hopes of bringing it up to speed with a rapidly changing landscape. Windows ...

The RSA FraudAction Research Lab has uncovered a sophisticated and tricky new phishing scheme. Dubbed the 'Chat-in-the-Middle' scam, the new attack targets the online customers of a specific U.S. financial institution and begins, as many scams do, as an apparently innocent log-in screen. The new twist, though, appears after the marks have entered their log-in information. Typically, once ...

Digsby What it does: Digsby is a multi-protocol chat client that connects you with friends on various instant-messaging networks, including Yahoo!, AIM, and Google Talk. What we like about it: In addition to supporting nearly every instant-messaging platform on earth (including Facebook Chat), Digsby can also check your e-mail and pull in updates and messages from Facebook, MySpace, and ...

Well, it turns out all these fancy social networking tools we've grown to love so much aren't really all that new. Thanks to projects that have been digitizing newspaper archives, researchers have turned up references to "Face Book" and "Twitter" several decades before the Internet was even a glint in a military scientist's eye. An article from the August 24, 1902 edition of the Boston Daily ...

The glut of recent incidents involving employees jeopardizing their jobs due to social networking mishaps may be enough to convince people to keep their online social activities separate from their work activities. Recent research, though, suggests that workers may be better served if they use social networking and instant messaging to remain in close contact with one another. Researchers from ...

What are you to do if you like social networking and interacting with people digitally, but don't actually like your friends? Or don't even want to know your conversation partner's identity? Well, 18-year-old Leif K-Brooks decided he was tired of talking to the people he knew in Brattleboro, Vermont, so he created Omegle. The site lets you anonymously chat with a complete stranger one-on-one. ...

The suicide attempt of an 18-year-old California boy was thwarted when his online friend (who was chatting with him via webcam) called police. Jesse Coltrane, a 22-year old New Jersey resident, called police when the teen he was chatting with cut his forearm with a razor. According to Coltrane, the disturbed teen said, "I need someone to talk to You're the only one I feel as though I can talk ...

Barack Obama's aides learned Friday they'll have to give up one of their favorite means of communicating with each other, the media, and the outside world: the near-ubiquitous instant message. The new White House lawyers say any communication involving government business that is sent via instant message will become a part of the official record and therefore subject to The Presidential ...

If you have ever sent a thank you note to an interviewer that read anything like the above headline, you probably didn't get the job. Increasingly, candidates are sending off casual thank you e-mails and even text messages -- unfortunately, we're not joking -- that incorporate IM shorthand and emoticons. The problem is that many younger job-hunters don't realize this may be costing them that ...

It was bound to happen eventually (if for no other reason than MySpace did it first) -- Facebook is finally offering up an instant-messaging service. Ironically, Facebook's new IM service may have the effect of killing off a couple of chat applications already available on the social-networking site. Initial rumors claimed that the new Facebook IM service, which is to be embedded into people's ...

In the spirit of full disclosure, AOL cuts our paychecks. But don't think that we're excited about this just because of contractual obligation. AOL has announced its Open AIM 2.0 initiative. While it is possible to chat with AIM via programs such as Pidgin and Trillian or web sites like Meebo, until now those operations were forced to hack their way into the AIM system. This limits advanced ...

Mobile, instant, always-on access to everyone you know is the new obnoxious forefront in communications technology. A new start-up calling itself Trumpia, has decided to take the obsession with constant communication to its absurd illogical extreme. Sign up with Trumpia, then betray your own sense of decency by inputting all of your friends' contact info ... and we mean all of it. Input, e-mail, ...