Now that I'm more rested, I feel able to post an addendum to this post and talk a little bit about AIM, LiveJournals, and RinkChat and how I see them and use them.

First, LiveJournals. Personally, I don't understand them. They seem almost arrogant to me, like I actually think someone gives a crap about my inane witterings enough to want to come to a special site to read and respond to them. I'm sure many people use LiveJournals in a way that they and their friends enjoy, but my thoughts on the matter are that I don't like them at all, don't read them unless coaxed by someone saying "Oh, you have to read so-and-so's LJ today, it's funny!" and don't have one of my own. If I have something to share with people I consider friends, I'll either post it here in the RinkWorks forum (if it has appeal to a wider audience then just the small number of people I consider close friends) or I'll mass e-mail people.

Now, about AIM. I'm almost a polar opposite to Sam in my opinion of AIM, it seems. When I'm in chat, I feel like I have to be present all the time in chat. I feel like it's rude to be in chat and not be away or idle but not be paying attention to the window (this is, of course, just a personal opinion and not something I think is a universal truth). I also feel like I *need* to be paying attention to it, because if someone says something to me, I may miss it if I'm not. An AIM window, though, I can ignore for literally hours and yet whatever the person had to say to me will still be there when I'm ready for it. I'm not sure why I have the expectation that a person logged into chat is paying attention but a person logged into AIM might not be, but that's how I feel, and if I IM Stephen with something and he doesn't respond for two hours, I don't take it personally.

Second, I feel I have much better conversations one-on-one or in very small groups than I do with groups of four or five or more. That's not to say that I don't enjoy a good group chat once in awhile, just that I couldn't possibly have all the conversations I *want* to have if my only form of communication was a group chat. Majority rules in chat, and if I want to talk about one thing and most everyone else is talking about something else, I either have to talk about what they're talking about, try to twist the conversation to my topic, or just not participate. The latter, unfortunately, ends up being the easiest.

Part of it may be an ego thing. On AIM, people who send me an IM want to talk to *me*. They've got something to say specifically to me, and I can use it to say something specifically to others. In RinkChat, There's never any sense that people want specifically to talk to me. Again, that's not always bad, but sometimes that one-on-one conversation, that "I want to discuss this with *you*, not nessecarily with this entire group of people" is what I'm looking for.

There's the argument that that is what PMs in chat are meant for. But I have two problems with that. First, is again the notion that chat is an active thing and AIM can be a passive one. If I'm doing something else, I'm far more likely to be logged into AIM on the side, and if someone has something to tell me, I've made myself available so they can get a message to me if they want to. I can respond to it at my leisure, and I can keep doing other things while that window sits there waiting for me (Again I'm almost the opposite of Sam in this regard, in that because I feel obliged to be paying attention to it while logged in, I find RinkChat *far* more intrusive on my online time than AIM.) Second is that if I get involved in a bunch of PMs, I stop paying any attention at all to what other people are saying. When I'm in "the green room", those other people in "the black room" are dead to me. At that point, if I'm just PMing with one other person, there doesn't seem any point to be doing it in chat, and in fact, AIM would be far more private in case something we're saying isn't for general consumption.

So my conclusion is that, personally, I'm not going to give up AIM anytime soon. I have no problems with going to chat more often if more of the people I really want to chat with are going to be there, but the majority of my relationships with others work better over AIM than in chat. I don't form close friendships with people if the only place I get to talk to them is in a multi-person chat.

-- Dave