jabber

My daughter has reached an age where all her friends are on MSN. While the school is concerned about it, I think that (occassionally monitored) online chat is actually a useful skill. Most of the chat is what you’d expect of tweens, misunderstandings and hurt feelings can happen very easily. That’s just like email.

I refuse to run MSN Messenger though. I just think it’s sufficiently insecure and closed source to be avoided. Most kids don’t know how MSN works, so they just do what their chat partner tells them to do. I’d rather my kids not install things just so they can get a neat smiley.

Tags: AIM, aMsn, Gadu-gadu, gaim, ICQ, IM-clients, IRC, jabber, MSN, Yahoo

The following quote appeared in an article in todays Sydney Morning Herald on Schools, parents to get talking about chatrooms

Last year, a Flinders University study of 114 teenage students found that on average, they spent 13 hours a week online, and one-third were “in the process of becoming psychologically addicted” to the internet.

The study seems to be authored by Dr Mubarak Ali but the Google link to the Flinders site isn’t working at the moment, so I can’t verify if that pull quote is an accurate summary of his findings. I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt as smart people rarely say such stupid things.

Tags: AIM, gaim, ICQ, IM-clients, IRC, jabber, MSN, social_network