Lost Treasures: Skype and Instant Messages

Remember when instant messaging on Yahoo or AOL was cool? I hate to say it but I think that those days have long passed us by...judging by the look my teenaged daughters are giving me, they're long gone. 

But, back in the old days before KIK, and things "going down in the DM" (direct message for us old folks), instant messaging was the fastest way to get a message to somebody without picking up the phone. Yep, it was not done on the phone, it was done on the computer. Now that everyone has text messaging and all kinds of other ways to communicate quick fast and in a hurry, Instant messages has fallen away with the likes of the Zune music player (my girls still laugh when I talk about how cool THOSE were). 

There are still some places where instant messaging plays a nice role such as Microsoft Project which has instant messaging capabilities so that people that are working on virtual project teams can communicate in real time about their work. KIK is also a nice little instant messaging program that a lot of people use. It allows for people to message each other without having to give your phone number to do it....when I was dating, KIK was a really great tool to protect me from giving my number out to people who I may be interested in but time would later prove that they weren't for me. I could just delete and block them from my KIK...no muss no fuss.  For much else, I don't see the widespread use anymore as most people have moved on to text messaging and direct messaging in sites like Facebook and Twitter. 

Skype is another site that I used to live by, especially during my deployments. I used it to communicate with my kids while I was gone and it was a big help in keeping us close. Being able to not only speak to but also see the person was such a great tool in keeping the moral high. I haven't used it much since I've returned home except for a long distance job interview when my family moved from Georgia to Kansas a few months ago. I think I was more nervous on the camera than I would have been in person but I appreciate that these types of technologies are being more widely used in those kinds of situations. I think that the use of Skype has started to fall away with he emergence of FaceTime and other like options for the Android...again, I think that it falls into whether or not someone can use their phone or tablet versus sitting down at their computers.