IM

Remember the good 'ol days when AIM was a new, cool thing? I remember sitting at my computer for hours chatting it up with every person I knew. It wasn't uncommon to have 10 IM conversations going at the same time. And I took pride in being able to arrange them all perfectly on the screen so they barely overlapped one another. And, of course, I exceled in the Windows-M key function that helped me convince my Dad I was hard at work, not 'wasting my life away.'

Now it's all flipped around. Are people too busy with other things to have 10 IM conversations at once? I swear I haven't talked to more than 3 people at one time in the past 2 years. In fact, talking to more than one person at a time now seems rare. Everyone's busy with work.

Back in the days I could carry on two hour conversations with people I barely knew. Now I'm much more hesitant to even IM an old college buddy I haven't seen in a while. Maybe life would be more fun if we all just IM'ed those names on our buddy lists instead of just checking their away messages. But we're all grown up now and we've left that to the next generation of multi-IM'ers.