Wednesday, June 10, 2009

O RLLY? LOL, BFF. C U L8R. (Translation: "Ou est la bibliotheque?")

I want you to be (almost) the first to know. I now have an AIM account.

Oh joy. Oh rapture.

Given how many different variations of my name I had to go through to get it, I suspect that I’ve had this account, or something very much like it, in the past. After all, I was a loyal AOLian for many years, back when it was cool (yes, once upon a time AOL was cool, but you’re probably not old enough to remember that) through when it bought Time Warner and went mainstream and all the techies deserted through when it was so uncool that it was supremely cool until that magic moment when it finally allowed the average working stiff to stop paying without having to hire a Wall Street legal team, which is when I bailed out, so I've missed out on the present day when Time Warner is finally able to consider leaving its rotting, maggoty carcass by the side of the superhighway. And I do remember distinctly my abortive use of IM back in the day, when I kept getting so annoyed by this one person in particular that I (metaphorically) threw it out the window and (metaphorically) never looked back.

Now I’ve got it again, primarily because two people in one week cursed me for not having it, a personal record (for being cursed for not having IM capability, not for being cursed per se, in which the number two doesn’t even get honorable mention). I may have been softened up a bit by Twitter, which is simply IM on steroids. I don’t know. But there are some issues that require more conversation than not, especially trying to iron out with 2MB the coaches online project. So far I’ve been instantly chatting away to MB (California branch), but that’s about it. I tried to connect to O’C, but he’s too busy texting me on my phone. (That doesn’t sound right.) Which brings up the issue, when I’ve been reading the documentation, that I can use AIM on my phone to text people. I mean, I can text people without using AIM… Whatever.

Anyhow, you can reach me at menickdebate, until which time as I get tired of being reached and block you. Or vice versa.

1 comment:

pjwexler said...

Speaking of twitter instead of instant messaging, the following is from Time Magazine through Tom Tomorrow

Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange. And it gave the event an afterlife on the Web. Yes, it was built entirely out of 140-character messages, but the sum total of those tweets added up to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles.

http://thismodernworld.com/4780

I dunno if that sez more about the writing at Time or more about Twitter, but...