Personal Messenger needs to go "Real-Time"

[TheWorldNewsMedia.org]

I understand the developers probably want to kill me when I compare this to Facebook...

BUT... one aspect that would go a LONG ways to getting rid of a large % of the "Old and Clunky" feel of forums is the real-time Messenger similar to what FB has.

Our current messenger needs to feel more like a real time chat....

FB has basically merged email with real time chat...

Any reason we couldn't / shouldn't?

Or at least offer admins the choice....

[KT Walrus]

I think that if you have an idea of exactly what this real-time Messenger is and how it would work, that you might want to try to convince a developer here to implement the app and post it to the Marketplace to be downloaded and installed on your site. I believe you can disable the built-in PM core component and just use this new app as a replacement.

[Rikki]

The biggest issue is really the technology to do that. It would require additional server tools to what we already require, notably a socket server. There's a possibility that we could offer these kinds of things on our Cloud plans in future.

[TheWorldNewsMedia.org]

@Rikki Yes... I suspect they are using something new.... however there are two ways to look at this IMHO:

 

1) It is too costly to implement (our users can't sustain it (the cost))

or is it ....

2) too costly NOT to implement? or (our users go elsewhere)

 

ps - You guys rock as a team by the way... I'm a big fan.

[crabpaws]

I just posted something about this here 

On one hand, people like to use chat and they're familiar with texting on their phones, where any one message isn't particularly important or long-lived (unless you're the FBI investigating a crime).

However,  for some of us, the personal messages we get in running our sites are very important, more like e-mail than chat.

Forums have the advantage over a vehicle like Facebook in that they can be archives for actual knowledge that people might want to retrieve years later. It's very hard to find any piece of information on Facebook, notwithstanding its hyped but not very capable search tools.

If IPS wants to go in the Facebook direction, it would be abandoning this important differentiation: Forums are better for longer and more long-lived discussions. 

If you want fast-food social media, long-form might seem slow and clunky to you. But if you need information about something that's important to you, you'd want to see detailed discussion.

From the current design of IPB personal messages, it looks like IPS is at best ambivalent about the importance or longevity of pms. I guess it could go more in the direction of chat, but those of us who do business on IPB-based sites and therefore depend on our personal messages would be shortchanged.