Sometime back, we had a long conversation about the need for an instant messaging feature in KineticGlue.   It is definitely a great way of communicating a quick bite of information.  However, we felt that a Chat feature would defeat the purpose of a collaboration platform.  An enterprise collaboration platform becomes more and more useful as people share more and more in the platform.  The permanency that gets built to information this way is a great boon for organizations: Information is preserved for future use, one could analyze and gain insight into what’s happening etc. – this line of thought is very interesting.  We thought instant messaging would rob away these advantages as people might ‘chat’ a lot and ‘share’ very less.

But many customers (very surprisingly!) have asked for Chat in the past.  And we also realized that Chat is convenient to pass messages that need not be left of permanency or shared with a wider audience.

So we struck a balance:  We built a robust, but simple, Chat engine in KineticGlue.  Users could chat with their contacts when they are online.  Chatting is kept, consciously, one-to-one; anything that is to be shared with more than one, can always be updated as a microblog (is it not?).  We do not allow any file sharing through Chat to avoid any security and permission issues (of course, some one could always do such things via their email).

Essentially, it’s a simple, but a great tool to use when you’re logged in.   So what’s next here?   Audio/ Video conferencing is something that we are thinking about.  Do let us know how we can play with it.