Chatting about Semester 2

This week's topic is IM. I've been IM'ing for a long time with friends, so long in fact that my friends and I often lament picking our screen names at age 13 and wishing we could change them now without having to inform everybody. Chatting lots definitely worked to my advantage last semester when doing a library school practicum performing chat reference for undergraduates. It's not uncommon to have multiple windows open when chatting and it seems like that's the toughest thing to get used to when people first start using IM. It was fun to be able to get experience with chat reference and I felt like it was a great service for the UW to be offering since lots of students used it. As for chatting in my own life, Gmail has a chat built right into it and they recently made it so you can sign in to AOL IM as well as Google Talk right in Gmail. That has made it so I hardly use AOL IM or meebo anymore since I can do it all in one site. Very handy.