Instant Messengers

Bonus points for knowing what heuristics means....

I have used nearly every Instant Messenger on the internet at some point. I still have an ICQ account (# 85214459) which for those who remember that is the oldest of the IM programs, by now it is much more esoteric. I began using it back in early 1999 as part of a web dev class that I took in high school. I moved on to many other IM programs ranging from AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), Yahoo IM, Pidgin, Meebo, to Trillian (which conveniently aggregated all other IM accounts in one program) I have since moved on to using Google as my primary IM means. IM flourished at a time when people didn't have smart phones and didn't facebook. I believe the advent of those two pieces of technology negatively impacted the usage of Instant Messenger programs. Now I don't need an additional piece of software to have the same effect, I can instead just use Facebook or Google to do the same thing.

This includes advanced functionality, which I use for business often, such as file sharing. However when collaborating on large projects I prefer to use actual project management software such as Freedcamp (www.freedcamp.com), primarily because it allow for version control.

The basic IM functionality has been co opted within numerous other programs and technologies that it is now fairly ubiquitous. As I am typing this a Google+ message pops up, it's from a client....I guess that is my cue....