Are you online?
I’ve been looking at a number of neat little tools that would allow me to tell people via my website whether or not I’m online at any given moment. I look at it as a way to take my blog to a new level. Make it more interactive in a way and get feedback from people reading it. (At least I hope that is what will happen by adding such a link.) There is a nifty little javascript out there that will tell people if you are logged into AIM or not. We currently use this on our library’s website to tell people if someone is available to ask at chat reference question or not. However, what I really want is to let people know that I am available to Skype. Sherri Vokey is testing a tool that let’s people know your Skype presence. This is one piece is my dream e-reference puzzle. Having a tool like Skype (with video, VOIP, and chat) that librarians could log into and use to communicate with users and that would let users know that a librarian is available is great. Even better Jybe offers Skype capabilities built-in (via Librarian in Black). There are lots of other nifty collaboration tools out there that allow people to work over the web. Michael Stephens showed me SubEthaEdit, which is a nice tool that lets you collaborative work on a text document with another person. With all these developments, part of me is glad that we didn’t jump into e-reference by purchasing a commercial solution. Especially since some of these low cost alternatives seem to be providing better functionality than traditional products. Only time will tell what impact this will have on commercial e-reference products.
I think that this is a very interesting post. We also believe that VR can be accomplished in a very easy way and are currently working on a presence awareness capability for Jybe. Anyone would have the ability to add HTML to their site to announce that they are online. Users could click the link and automatically create a Jybe session – the online user is then sent an email or IM to join the session. This would enable any person to announce presence and then have a user join them in the context of any web based application. This is where collaboraiton is heading – context based vs. application based – a very different paradigm but one that we believe in.
As always, I welcome feedback from anyone on this or any other topic regarding Jybe.
Regards,
Brian