I’ve recently moved, and that means meeting new people and making new friends. And that means getting instant-messages (IM) from people for the first time. Unfortunately, no IM clients handle that initial contact as well as it should. The basic problem is that they don’t give you enough information to figure out who the person is, making for awkward situations where you know you already know the person, but you don’t have the foggiest idea who the hell they are. And if that wasn’t bad enough — you are interacting with them for the first time in a different social medium, and you know what they say about first impressions…
For example, iChat only shows you the screen-name of someone when they message you for the first time. (This isn’t necessarily a bad trade-off for people who are easily offended). Unfortunately screen-names are (often) totally incomprehensible. Even when you can see what they are saying, it’s often something unrevealing like “hey, what’s up?” In general, there isn’t a quick way to get meaningful information about a person before you start chatting to them — unless you do your own legwork.
Fortunately computers can do that legwork for you. The moment an unknown screen-name says something to you, your client should start researching them, presenting you with any relevant information it finds.
In my experience, just searching
In college I modified some dashboard widget to do facebook+google searches for me. It wasn’t as good as having the functionality baked into the chat-client, but it was pretty fast (hit F12 + click + type one thing in one place + enter), and that made it worlds better then doing the legwork through a browser. It was sometimes useful when a new semester started (unfortunately I haven’t needed it for long enough to lose it).
Instant Messaging clients could do a lot more to make first-contact easier by presenting more information about who’s talking to you. It’s just a matter of connecting parts that exist today.