Friday, 29 June 2007

Week 6 – Instant Messaging and Skype

I am hoping that this will be one of the easier weeks for you all. Instant Messaging and Skype are second nature to many people now and are a great way to keep in touch with your friends, family and colleagues. Did you know as of April 2006 there were 100 million registered Skype users. Not bad for something that was only released in 2003. For this task you will need to have a set of headphones and a microphone. I think both libraries have some of these but you may need to share.

  1. Play around with instant messaging

Instant messaging is a fun way to keep in touch with friends and family. The immediacy of instant messaging makes it far more interactive than email. In fact, a conversation between 2 fast typists using instant messaging can be nearly as frantic as talking on the phone. To join in the fun, however, you will first need to set up an instant messaging account. There are many instant messaging clients but for this exercise we will be using MSN Messenger.

Exercises:

  1. Download and install MSN Messenger from here.
  2. Add several contacts. These can be anyone you like, friends, family or colleagues.
  3. Blog your experiences about this task.
  1. Call your friends using Skype

Skype is a little piece of software that lets you make free calls to anyone else on Skype, anywhere in the world. And even though the calls are free, they are really excellent quality. If you and your friends, family or business contacts are using webcams, you can also make free video calls. You can even call landlines and mobile phones at really cheap rates.

Just like instant messengers, you can also use Skype to chat with not just one person at a time, but with up to 100 people in a group chat. You can even bookmark the chat and find it later, which is handy for recurrent chats with family and business contacts.

Exercises:

  1. Download and install Skype from here
  2. Add several Skype contacts. These can be anyone you like, friends, family or colleagues.
  3. Try and add a Skype button on your Blog. This is a fairly straightforward thing to do. Instructions can be found here

1 comment:

Ozzie said...

I'm a SKYPER at last!