Critical of YM

Critical of YM 

          The article 'The benefits of chat room from Yahoo Messenger for users' begins with the discussion of Yahoo Messenger (YM) chat room. The author of this article Min Da describes the benefits provided by the chat room to the chatters. She also stated that YM provide free chat room where people can enjoy chatting with their friends and family. On the one hand, YM chat room also allow users to add their friends very easily by just press Ctrl + A. Once the person added to the friends list, their name will appear in yellow colour which remains the person is online. Other than that, the chatters also can send private message to the people they wish to send the message and the most interesting thing is the chatters can personalize the chat room as they like. For example they can change font type, colour and also the background of chat room via IMVironment icon.

           On the other hand, this article also notes that YM chat room also offer unique message functions to chatter. Where the chatters can be appearing visible to those they are not interested to chat, at the same time they also can be appear online to a certain contacts in their friends list. In addition, the chatters also can send to their offline friends and the message will be display once the friend is online. Indeed, we can conclude that the author is reveal that the YM chat rooms always provide benefits to the chatters.

           However, I personally not very satisfied with her statements. Even though, YM chat rooms providing many benefit but sometimes these benefits creates problems to the chatters. It was because, I’m as YM chat room user, sometimes tending to face many problems while using chat rooms. One of the problem is my Internet connection becomes poor when I’m changing the chat room background and its take a long time to change it. This also cause delay in the process of sending messages in chat room. This because, yahoo messenger basic requirement to display IMVironment is the users Internet connection should have at least 50k (Doyle, 2001). As such, people who have low connection might not enjoy this YM features.

          Besides that, I also not satisfied with the chat room settings. Once I delete a person from my contacts, the person name will not be in my friend list anymore. Although I delete that person, my name still will be appearing in that person’s friends list. When I’m being online, the person can still send message to me and its make me feel irritating.

          Other than that, exists of YM chat rooms may reduce the face-to-face communication style (Wang, 2008). As we all know that YM chat room is one of the medium to contact the persons those are being far from us. But nowadays, people started to take advantages of YM chat room to contact with the people even those are staying in one roof. According to (Doyle, 2001) more than 45% of the companies in US have employees who using YM at work place. For example, in working place, the workers always use YM chat room to contact and give feedback with each other’s even though there is no long distance between them. This make people become lazy and face-to-face communication is reducing.

           As a suggestion for these problems, I think YM messenger system should be more efficient and try to reduce the background IMVironment file size as it will not affect the Internet connection and everyone can enjoy their chat room conversation. The YM chat room users also should use the YM services wisely and try to practice face-to-face communication which can build good relationships among each others.

References

Doyle, S. (2001). Is instant messaging going to replace SMS and email as the medium of choice for direct customer communications? 1-10.

Wang, S.-K. (2008). The Effects of a Synchronous Communication Tool (Yahoo Messenger) on Online Learners’ Sense of Community and their Multimedia Authoring Skills. Journal of Interactive Online Learning, Vol.7 (1) , 59-74.