What If Sites Used Im Instead Of Email To Contact?

[Baniboy 3]

Okay, the topic title is kind of confusing I know, but I'll try to explain here. You see, I register in a lot of sites, I also get many e-mail notifications from different sites when they for example say that I have reset my password, my subscription has expired, my threads have been replied to, somebody said something to me on facebook, I have won the nobel prize etc. You get the idea, excluding that last one...After getting scared off at how my e-mail got hacked when I was using webmail notifier on my firefox (and I have COMPLEX PASSWORDS. Really, like bleeping and blooping complex... you get the idea), I started manually checking my emails, and I get tons of these.If all this stuff would come to me through IM, like how facebook has it's notification area, it would save me the trouble and I wouldn't have to visit my e-mail account every time I've reset my password on some site. I could see them in real time.?Anyway, just an idea.EDITY: another idea, how about removing the kontera ads for logged users in the posts? I don't know if I'm the only one seeing them, but I can see them on Opera running on Ubuntu. It's annoying..

Edited April 23, 2010 by Baniboy (see edit history)

[rvalkass 5]

How would it work if you were signed out of your IM account? Not all services support sending messages to offline users. You also can't display more complex emails (ie. HTML) using IM services, and I imagine if that was brought in on some IM services, people would get much more annoyed with the spam messages they'd receive.

[Baniboy 3]

Okay, I didn't exactly mean IM, but some kind of real-time notification area, like in facebook (notifies that somebody liked your photo, for example). That would work when you were offline, too, and notify you when you log in next time. It would display short messages, nothing like complete HTML emails and attachment management.Something like in every message, you would see some notification, like this: "X replied to your thread 'what if sites used IM instead of e-mail to contact' on Xisto forums."I think it might be handy.

[Little Asterisk 1]

It probably wouldn't be possible through IM, but it'd also be very complex to create an application which could support that type of stuff. Why not just simply use one spam e-mail adress (i.e. chuck.noriss@yahoo.com) for registering on suspicious sites? Then you could install a free mail client, like Mozzila Thunderbird and manage all your accounts from there. Or, you could buy Microsoft Office Outlook and manage all your accounts from there. You get the picture, I think... It's much less complications for everyone

[k_nitin_r 8]

Hi!

@Baniboy

There are a couple of websites out there that send out messages via GoogleTalk whenever the users are online. However, when the users are offline, they switch to email instead. With free/economical hosting providers, it may not be possible to implement GoogleTalk integration due to the limitations of the hosting service.

There are a lot of websites that use Skype or GoogleTalk links on their Contact Us page and many forums let other members see a user's IM IDs too, so that's one way they use IM instead of email. When using IM, blocking spam is harder because most IM clients do not have automated spam filters.

BTW, logged in users do not see advertisements on Xisto. Perhaps you're not logged in or have cookies disabled?

@rvalkass

One way to get around the problem is to hold messages in queue till the user comes online. Skype does not support true offline messaging but rather the Skype client holds on to the messages till the user comes online and sends the messages out. What this means is that both users have to be online at the same time to community and composing messages to an offline user simply gets the messages queued till both users are online again. As Skype uses a peer-to-peer technology for communication, offline messaging would be hard to accomplish when compared to Yahoo Messenger, GoogleTalk, or MSN Messenger that have a client-server architecture.

@Little Asterisk

There's a website that provides throw-away email addresses for use, so unless you're expecting to receive a password or activation link via email, you can use one of the throw-away email addresses. Some email services give you a temporary email address. Examples of such services are: https://www.24fundraiser.com/ and 10minutemail.com

[Little Asterisk 1]

@Little Asterisk
There's a website that provides throw-away email addresses for use, so unless you're expecting to receive a password or activation link via email, you can use one of the throw-away email addresses. Some email services give you a temporary email address. Examples of such services are: https://www.24fundraiser.com/ and 10minutemail.com

Hi nitin,

I'm aware that those sites exist, but I somehow prefer using Yahoo mail since I never know when that kind of info might be useful to me.
However, if anyone else prefers disposable mails, that's OK, too. Not much difference between these two types.

[Бојан 0]

Well email is the father of communicating trough internet so there is no way that IM is older than email. IM is a son of email. And we all know that IM is better than his father and i would say that it will be better than the email waiting your friend to read the message and then write back for maybe one day. The IM is more compact, you know when you friend is online and it has other features better than email.

[Little Asterisk 1]

Well, IM is better in only so much terms than e-mail. I know I use it when programming with someone else and in need of some quick information. However, IM is quite unusable when receiving multiple messages from other people, weather business or personal.Why? For one, you can't format the message so good. For personal mails, that would be OK (and IM is great as far as personal goes), but business mails should never be badly formatted (because you won't get the job ). Secondly, browsing through old IM's would be a pain, you'd have to scroll back through tens of "Yes, that's right" or "Cool..." messages to find what you're looking for. I'm over-dramatising, but you get the point. ;)IM is the next generation, but I'm not sure will it ever replace e-mail. But then again, neither was Bill Gates sure about the internet... Or 64 kilobytes of memory (for the ones who don't know, he once said 64 (or so) kb of memory is more than anyone will ever need ). So... Yes, maybe we'll be using IM somewhere in the future instead of e-mails or SMS messages. Maybe we won't use neither of those three, but some mixture between them. You never know.

[Baniboy 3]

I said it might be somewhat confusing to explain, and seeing some of the replies, it apparently was. Anyway, if anyone of you have used facebook before, you're familiar with the notification thingy there, aren't you? I meant kind of the same thing. For example one of those in Xisto saying that someone has replied to a thread I replied to earlier today. That would be handy. RSS feeds here at least don't seem to work properly.My original suggestion was a centralized desktop application, that all websites would use to send the notifications to.@Nitin: Good to know that a similar kind of thing has been put to practice already. I wish it was used by more sites!

[Shahrukh 0]

Firstly, your idea would require you to be logged in to the site that wants to send you the notification. Like facebook. And even facebook emails stuff.Secondly, isn't it better to collect all the messages at one place rather than at each site?Thirdly, isn't it more convenient that we can see all the messages at our will rather than get disturbed all day with such messages?So, 1+2+3 = isn't email better?

[rpgsearcherz 5]

Firstly, your idea would require you to be logged in to the site that wants to send you the notification. Like facebook. And even facebook emails stuff.Secondly, isn't it better to collect all the messages at one place rather than at each site?
Thirdly, isn't it more convenient that we can see all the messages at our will rather than get disturbed all day with such messages?

So, 1+2+3 = isn't email better?

I agree with you. I dislike IM's for a lot of things because they require you to be attentive. We've all been at the point where it's either us or the other party getting angry since you (or the other) isn't responding fast enough.

Email helps to soften that, giving a slower, much more comfortable pace (there are things IM's are good for, of course, but for things like websites you'd rather not have to respond instantly).

[The Simpleton 2]

Oh, this topic has been brought back to life after two months - oh well, it's an interesting idea to receive notifications through IM and I know FB notifications are very useful and they appear instantly, sometimes before the notification email arrives! If websites were to implement the IM notification system on their own then I guess it wouldn't be a problem, but for the users to find a solution themselves.....I wonder if that's possible. Wouldn't it require access to the site's code first? Otherwise a script might have to be written to automatically send the contents of the email as an IM to yourself. Does such a script exist? It would be cool if it did!