Life as a chatbot

So this is me testing out a new service called IMified, which allows you to access a whole bunch of web services (Backpack, Google Calendar) and your blogs from an IM service. It makes a lot of sense -- I spend more and more time in chat windows, with friends, co-workers, even clients, and I'm nowhere near this service's target market -- but let's face it, the text entry box of iChat isn't exactly conducive to long deep thoughts. On the other hand, it gets one off one's ass to post. We'll have to see how this works out.

(ETA: No paragraph breaks, it doesn't seem like, and I had to come to the Wordpress interface to add tags.  Still, an interesting 1.0.  Check it out)

Comments

[rone]

I can safely say there's no way i'm sending any sort of password over some IM-driven third party. Wow.

[Misha]

Some of the services IMified is using have an API that authenticates on the application end, not via IM. Which is probably the next step for all of the services, quite frankly -- there's too much convenience in tools like IMified and even Twitter for them not to.

[Steven]

I think most people have an app that's ground zero for their on-line lives. For me it's e-mail, for my wife it would be Web (and predictably she uses something web-based, Gmail, for mail). Certainly for some people it's IM (and for others it's a cellphone, so an IM-centric app might help there as well).

[Misha]

I like that way of thinking about it, the app that's at the center of your online life. IM has taken a larger and larger role in my own online life, with Bonjour especially important as my office grows, and I understand the Kids Today are big fans of it as well.

Web-based e-mail is just, to me, shockingly common: I had to explain to a pretty tech-savvy 40something that you could download your mail onto your computer, and keep it there, and it took some doing!