Instant messenging ringing popularity among students
Fastest form of free Internet communication is easy to use; time efficient

By Alisha Brown
Staff Reporter

The ring of instant message has long replaced the thrill of “You’ve Got Mail” for millions of instant messenger users who have logged on and checked into the fastest form of Internet communication.

On college campuses, where home for many is a long-distance phone call away, instant messenging has become a cost efficient communication alternative.

Dick Rinewalt, an associate professor and chairman of the computer science department, said instant messenging works one of two ways. In the first method, the messenger’s text is sent to a central server where it’s bounced off and forwarded to the messenger.

In the second method, a distributor server notes your location when you log onto the program and when the messenger writes, the distributor server notes the destination and sends it there automatically without traveling to the server first. Both ways are near instantaneous, he said.

According to an article in Time magazine’s monthly publication, ON, in the last few years 175 million people have been using instant messenging services.

Rebecca Agnew, a sophomore business major, is one of them. She sat down at her desktop computer in Houston two years ago and received an instant message from someone she had never met at the time. Agnew said she was reluctant to answer the message but was polite and said hello anyway.

Carlos Medina was on the other end sitting at his computer in San Antonio reading through AOL member profiles when he came across Agnew’s. Her profile still listed her as a San Antonio native, although her family had moved recently.

gnew said the two realized Medina had moved to their high school at the same time Agnew had left it.

Over the next few months, they caught up on mutual friends and school news. Agnew came to TCU and Medina went to Texas Wesleyan University and their friendship went from on-line to in-person.

“I was the last person I thought would meet people over the Internet,” Agnew said. “But the way it happened was so funny. We just kept realizing we had a lot of history in common. Now he’s just like any of my old high school friends.”

Agnew and other students have saved money on long-distance bills when they talk with other friends away at college.

Adam Bird, a sophomore psychology major, said he has kept in touch with his best friend for over two years using instant messenging.

When his friend, Britney Vore, left for college, Bird was still a senior in high school. Their first attempt to keep in touch was using calling cards.

“When she first left, 10 cents a minute was the best you could do,” he said. “But when I downloaded AOL Instant Messenger, we could talk two or three times a day for free.”

Rinewalt said the trend in instant messenging took hold only in the last few years, but the program has been around in a crude form since 1983.

According to ON, a company called Control Video was the first to offer instant messenging to its customers of The Gameline, a service that delivered video games to Atari game systems over phone lines. Users could send text messages while they played. When The Gameline landed belly-up in 1984, the company changed its name to America Online.

teve Case, the chief executive officer for AOL, had been Control Video’s marketing assistant.

Originally, using instant messaging was only available to AOL customers until a competitor showed up on the screen.

ccording to ON, Mirabilis, a Israeli start-up company, began offering its own service called ICQ for free.

According to ON, in six months 850,000 people downloaded the program. AOL then decided in 1998 to offer its own program for free to everyone, AOL e-mail account or not, and proceeded to buy Mirabilis. Combined, the two companies hold 80 percent of the market with nearly 135 million users.

Other companies such as Yahoo, Microsoft Network and Excite have launched their own programs. None are, however, compatible with each other — not even AIM or ICQ, both owned by the same company, according to ON.

“I think ideally it would be nice if they were all compatible,” Bird said. “But you can download as many as you want. I just wish all my friends had the same one.”

There are still other problems. Instant communication has its ups and downs. Language symbols, called emoticons, are meant to replace expression sometimes void in type-written messages.

“You can kind of get crossways when you’re not directly speaking to someone and can’t hear their voice or see their body language,” Bird said. “Sarcasm is especially hard to detect if you don’t know the person really well. I still call people because IM can be impersonal sometimes.”

Instant messenging has become almost too easy for some students. Agnew said it’s taking it to an extreme when students on campus or down the hall IM each other rather than picking up a phone.

“Conversations can get finished more quickly on the phone,” she said. “I hate it when I get an IM from someone in the next room. It’s pure laziness.”

But the convenience of instant messenging is still rapidly advancing. Yahoo has already come out with messenging for cell phones, Palm Pilots, PocketPCs and pagers.

Alisha Brown
a.k.brown2@student.tcu.edu