The other day, I saw a comment somewhere stating “instant messaging is the devil”. That got me thinking about how I use instant messaging and what it’s good and bad for. What follows is a short list of the key features I think are good and bad:

What is interesting to me, is that two points show up as both a good and a bad feature.

Instant Delivery

The instant nature of instant messaging is amazing, as soon as you click send – its delivered. There is no lag or delay of any significance and you can undertake an instant message conversation at great pace; it really makes email seem slow and antiquated by comparison. When using my computer, I tend to leave things open. So, in the case of an instant message client – I sign in first thing in the morning and I sign out when I go home. The problem is, people can contact you at all times and the nature of the instant message demands your immediate attention. When at work, this can be a distraction for obvious reasons but more importantly, it leads to breaking concentration.

Convenient

Instant messaging is convenient, amazingly convenient. If you work with a computer regularly, you can no doubt type at a good pace. At which point, having the ability to instant message someone and hopefully get an immediate response is excellent. The problem, which is related to the instant nature as well, is that often you end up spending more time using it than you need to. You ask someone a direct question, you get an answer and what often follows is another minute or more of quick messages. The time adds up very quickly until your work time is just slipping away from you.

The Real World

At work, it was decided we shouldn’t be using instant messaging or IRC. I initially thought it was a poor decision, as we often gather a lot of fast response, good quality information through it. For instance, the fantastic support in the #postgresql channel on irc.freenode.net is invaluable at times, so is being able to contact other developers. However at work, you end up being messaged by non-work related contacts – which leads to spending a minute or two talking about something. Across the course of a day or week, all the minutes soon add up and you’re losing hours.

At home, I find it nearly impossible to get any work done when I’m signed in. You’re contact list assumes, since you’re signed in you must be available to chat. The same thing happens, a little chat here and a little chat there – soon enough you’re work hours are running out and your work isn’t getting done.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve found my use of instant messaging has been slowly declining, until now I often don’t sign in at work at all. It isn’t because work colleagues take up too much time, its the distraction and cumulative minutes here and there. A nice solution would involve grouping your contacts (like you can in MSN) and then allow a group to see you during the day. Using a mechanism like that, you’d at least be limiting your distraction to work related contacts – whom generally contact you about work related things.

When I’m using my computer, it is mostly about getting things done. I am fast building the view that free for all instant messaging isn’t conducive to that outcome at all. A similar opinion is close to being drawn about having your mail client open and auto-receiving mail for you; though the final judgment on that is still undecided.

In March, Google agreed it would aquire the California based web analytics company Urchin. Urchin have been in the web statistics business since 1995 and are an established player claiming statistics that over 20% of Fortune 500 companies use their package.

Since finalising the deal on the 3rd of March, the Google developers have been hard at work. That work is now available to the general public in the form of Google Analytics. Google Analytics works by embedding a small piece of JavaScript into each page of your site and when a page is viewed, it is reported back to their central server. This is akin to how Google tracks conversion and clicks through AdSense.

Using JavaScript and/or cookies to track statistics isn’t a new thing, its been done before. What I think is different this time, is the scale its being executed on. Traditionally, client side tracking systems provided very limited information about your site. Now that Google have the ability to parse your traffic logs through a server side application like Urchin, the rules and boundaries of client side tracking are changing. Some of the key features Google list include:

• Keyword Campaign Comparison
• Executive Summaries
• AdWords Integration
• Trend Reporting
• E-Commerce
• Funnel Visualization
• Site Overlay
• Advanced Visitor Segmentation
• GeoTargeting
• Analysis Options

The majority of those features are available in server side log analysis applications. The two features that I think are note worthy, are keyword campaign comparisons and integration with Google AdWords. You can now advertise on Google through AdWords and see the effect that it is having on your site, without having to filter through volumes of information. Don’t think it is limited to tracking Google advertising systems though -you can track (but not necessarily integrate) all other advertising systems as well. The other point of interest with Google Analytics is that since it is client side, you are tracking real people on your site. The single biggest problem with server side packages is that there is no accurate way of filtering out non-human hits (ie, from the Google Bot). The issue of course, is that you are getting false positives which could ultimately change your decision making process in your site design or structure.

Google Analytics is a free service to the public allowing up to 5 million page views per month per account. If you have an active AdWords account, it is provided without the page view limitation. What isn’t outlined on the terms of service is if there is a cost after 5 million page views per account per month, when you don’t have an active AdWords account. If there is, there aren’t going to be a lot of people that take that level of traffic that don’t already have their own statistical package in use.

With the massive audience that Google has and what is on offer with this new product, I would expect there to be a massive update of Google Analytics in the future.

Following on from IE7 Beta 1 receiving its first public beta release, comes more fantastic news. On the 29th July, the IE team posted again, outlining what has already been fixed in IE7 but is not present in the release they made available. For those that don’t feel like clicking through:

• Peekaboo bug
• Guillotine bug
• Duplicate Character bug
• Border Chaos
• No Scroll bug
• 3 Pixel Text Jog
• Magic Creeping Text bug
• Bottom Margin bug on Hover
• Losing the ability to highlight text under the top border
• IE/Win Line-height bug
• Double Float Margin Bug
• Quirky Percentages in IE
• Duplicate indent
• Moving viewport scrollbar outside HTML borders
• 1 px border style
• Disappearing List-background
• Fix width:auto
• HTML 4.01 ABBR tag
• Improved (though not yet perfect) <object> fallback
• CSS 2.1 Selector support (child, adjacent, attribute, first-child etc.)
• CSS 2.1 Fixed positioning
• Alpha channel in PNG images
• Fix :hover on all elements
• Background-attachment: fixed on all elements not just body

These are the sorts of fixes that the standards based development community have been screaming about for the last five years. I’m very excited to hear that in the coming months, we might be able to see the first stable release of IE7 with a vast portion of fixes in place. Lets keep those wheels rolling and squish the bugs that have plagued Internet Explorer for years.

On Wednesday 27th July, the Microsoft IE team announced the public release of IE7 Beta 1.

In April, I commented on IE7 Beta 1 initially being announced and had some serious reservations about it. I felt IE7, in general, was going to be nothing but a patch job and a half arsed attempt at fixing an old and out of date browser. Microsoft have aimed to fix IE many times before, however it has always fallen by the roadside. So, it is easy to see how most people were quite cynical that this time would be any different.

With the initial announcement, the IE team made it clear that the first release of IE7 would be quite limited. Their primary concern was fixing and increasing security, which has plagued all versions of IE. They did mention that they were fixing a couple CSS errors and a couple of general improvements, like PNG support.

Now that it is out, they haven’t disappointed. Dave Shea of Mezzoblue has put together a fairly critical article describing what has and hasn’t been fixed, pointing out that most of the common CSS problems still exist. I’m not quite sure why the tone of that article is so harsh, well I think it is pretty harsh. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, the IE team said that they weren’t aiming to fix those problems in the first release.

Personally, I think that the developer community should be more happy than sad. The IE team said they were going to release a public beta this summer (ie: the Australian winter) and they have. They have fixed the things they said they would and have committed to adding and fixing plenty more in the future. The wheels of big business often turn slowly, this case is no different. The good news is that they are turning, which is a requirement for them improving the rather dire position that Internet Explorer is in.