March 12th, 2007
Hyderabad, India

A new phenomenon is sweeping across the Internet, causing managers a lot of worry and mothers a lot of panic. Its rapidly expanding user base calls it anything from 'status chatting' to 'giving head'. With the infectious nature with which it works, chances are that a loved one is engaged in this very dangerous activity even as you read this.

It's chatting at the next level! Discrete and effective, it involves chatting through the Status Message of popular IM clients usually reserved to indicate the current status and/or disposition of the user:"Oh, I use it mostly for casual chatting, without commitments", says a user who preferred to remain anonymous, "but sometimes I'll stick in a URL or two in there for the heck of it. Sometimes it's one-on-one, but more often than not I'm doing it with multiple partners across different IMs". Is such rampant and seemingly irresponsible behaviour a cause for concern?

Renowned psychologist Atyanta Thinkar attributes this phenomenon to the constant yearning of the mind for exclusivity, while at the same time its need to explore its dark voyeuristic tendencies. He assured us that apart from studies that show the link between status chatting behaviour to lameophoresis, there is really nothing to fear. There are more than a few people who would beg to differ from this point of view, however.

Hari Sadu, a manager in Eyebeem, Hyderabad, described his mounting worry of the number of hours his team has lost to this new hobby. "It's deceptive in the way it takes away a person's time incrementally without him even realizing it!" Eyebeem, like most companies around the world, is taking an aggressive approach to curb this emerging menace. "We are pushing major IM providers to use different ports for status messages and chats so we can effectively block one while letting the other through", says Mr. Sadu. "While communication within most companies is indeed done through IMs and is a productive facility overall, status chatting shows very alarming figures on the productivity scale".

Geeta Sangeeth was involved in a relationship for about a year until she caught her boyfriend cheating on her through status messaging. "We used to chat all the time", she said, "until I realized that he was status messaging someone else while chatting with me". It took Geeta some time to correlate his frequent status message updates with those of her best friend's due to its discrete nature, but once she was sure, sure enough it broke their relationship immediately.

"The real issue here is that the sociopsychological characteristics of this new collaborative behaviour has not concretised in the minds of users", said Dr. Thinkar. "Different people are reacting to it in different ways, and it will take a while before clear boundaries are defined as to what is acceptable and what isn't".

For the more cautious, it is advised to keep away from the phenomenon until its long term effects are fully understood. Staying away is fairly easy by following these simple instructions:

1. Make sure you uninstall IM clients that allow status messages to be edited. These include most popular IMs including Google and Yahoo.
   
2. Use IM clients like GAIM that implement multiple protocols, thus ensuring that they have poor status message support for any one protocol.
3. For companies, we suggest developing custom IM solutions that do not implement status messages at all.
   

In the end, the choice is yours! Join one of many Internet revolutions and pamper your mind, or be a non-believer and stay away from what many deem potentially dangerous and destructive. We wish you luck either way.

--Routers, err... Reuters