Used to communicate important information and provide contact outside of lectures to great effect, email has emerged as the communication medium of choice. However, Instant Messaging is fast emerging as a favourable world-wide method of communication with its interactive nature and appealing user interfaces. However, can it be as effective within the organisation and more importantly the univer...

Computing and communication systems are at the core of the modern office worker’s everyday experience. At any given point in time, a person might be notified of the arrival of a new email, receive an instant message from a colleague, be reminded by a calendar program of an upcoming appointment, receive a phone call on their office or mobile phone, and be involved in a face-to-face interaction w...

onsumer instant messaging (CIM) services (aka public IM) such as AOL Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, and MSN Messenger have achieved critical mass appeal and usage as a convenient and informal method of communication supporting real-time messaging and presence awareness.1,2 Unfortunately, these services are highly vulnerable from a security standpoint. Some of these security problems include threa...

We provide a survey on security features and threats to existing Instant Messaging (IM) networks and discuss how currently available systems fail to provide adequate security in light of existing threats. Our discussion and analysis provide a starting point from which to advance academic research in the area of secure IM systems, enabling security improvement in the longer term.

Mobile devices and mobile networks are becoming more data-centric (evident in Japanese I-mode) even as mobile network voice Average Revenue Per User are declining, new stream of data services are required which must take cognisance of handhelds features albeit their small screen estate and input/output limitations. A text only Instant Messaging (IM) built on the Internet Engineering Task Force ...

Microblogging is a new way of communication among people which allows them to disseminate messages via web, mobile phone, email or instant messaging. In 2010, microbloggers generated 65 million messages a day on Twitter alone. Our hypothesis is that tweeting is an activity which its users perform in order to stills some needs. In this paper, we describe an approach for analysing user purposes i...

In the recent development of a human-in-the-loop simulation test bed designed to examine human performance issues for supervisory control of the Navy's new Tactical Tomahawk missile, measurements of operator situation awareness (SA) and workload through secondary tasking were taken through an embedded instant messaging program. Instant message interfaces (otherwise known as "chat"), already a m...

Instant messaging (IM) has become more and more common these days, and is complementing email and other means of electronic communication. However, due to its heavily context-dependent nature, searching archives of instant messages using only full text search is a tedious task. Also, in contrast to mails, files, and other electronic media, instant messages typically do not feature a unique iden...

Nowadays, Instant Messaging (or IM for short) is becoming one of the most popular applications on the Internet. Individuals can communicate instantly through a user-friendly graphical user interface over fixed and wireless devices. However, several security issues occur, majorly privacy and authentication. A number of secure IM protocols have been proposed, but they still lack of necessary secu...