About a month ago, I stuck a plugoo widget on my blog. It’s cool – it allows people to chat with me while reading my blog, and delivers the messages right to my regular IM client on my Mac, Adium. Not bad.
But plugoo it doesn’t know when I’m there and when I’m not there. Because it often looks like I’m there when I’m not, people feel like I’m ignoring them. This is probably Adium or AIM that is causing the problem, but I don’t really care. I’ve also decided that I don’t really want to be IM’d any time of day by people who read the blog. I love hearing from you, but I’d rather hear from you in the comments or in an email. Real time IMs are just a pain as it often distracts me from what I’m focused on at the moment.
I first started thinking about this two weeks ago after Gwen Bell called out the “plugoo problem”. She swore she wasn’t talking about my blog. 😉
I’ve also been on a personal productivity kick lately. I’ve been needing to jam more meaningful work into the average day, so I’ve been really optimizing using GTD, Inbox Zero, Calendar Zero, and other similar concepts. It’s made a huge difference for me. The idea of soliciting IMs using plugoo was counter to what I was trying to accomplish.
I still think Plugoo is a great widget in certain situations, such as tech support. It’s just not for me in my situation.
I’ve now removed it from the sidebar and stuck it on the contact page. I’ve put the caveat up that it sucks at presence, so it may look like I’m there when I’m not. But you can always try reaching me using IM if you want. You’ll have much better luck using email on the contact page – I pretty much always answer email.
Hope to hear from you soon!
