Out of SL IM'ing with those on your SL friends list

I'm relatively new to Second Life but already i have made many friends whom i enjoy chatting to regularly, i don't get to access SL as much as i would like and sometimes when i have net access i still can't play SL for various reasons. In several instances i have recieved IM's from friends in-world to my email address (copies of IM's sent to my offline avatar) and have emailed them back successfully, my email's becoming in-world IM's. I think that it would be a great feature on the friends list of the SL website where you can hyper link to a post board that lets you send a message in-world then replies are sent to your email address (if you have this feature enabled), this way friends don't have to keep coming out of SL to write emails to you and your not hassling them, its just another IM for them to reply to in-world. If you like the idea (and i hope some of you do) i'd like to rally a little support before polling it. Thanks for reading.

Dygash Talamasca

~I always watch~

HEYA DYGASH!

This gets brought up a lot—Jeffrey Gomez, links please?—altho it is kind of hard to search for in the archives due to a lack of easy keywords. From last year:

/13/9c/20872/1.html

And I'd like this, as well as a way to retain IMs between logins to SL because sometimes I have to logout for a bit and come back quickly, and it's an inconvenience to just terminate all things there like an analog phone call.

Wow. I was just logging in to these forums suggest the same thing! *grin*

Seriously, it really would be handy to have a link on your 'Friends online' page in the SL Website, or from a person's Forum profile listing in the website, that would enable you to initiate a link to do a quick IM chat with someone who is in-world at the moment.

I work all day on an older computer that hasn't got anywhere near the capability to run SecondLife. But I frequently have time to take short breaks and use a web browser or a chat client. That means if I am on a break, and notice on the website's Friends page that a friend is on-line, my only way to chat with them is to go to a completely different computer and open SL there. That's just not possible some days. But if I could open a chat via the website, I could take care of a lot of simpler things where I just need to communicate.

From the other side of the coin, when I am in-world in SL, I usually don't have any other apps open, and I have SL expanded to full-screen. So keeping track of a seperate chat client like AOL or ICQ would not be terribly practical. I'd much rather have it pop up in the standard in-world IM window, if someone was able to IM me from the Internet.

I think my priority list, highest to lowest) would be:

1: Ability to IM only those people currently on your Friends list in-world, if they are in-world at that time, initiated from the SL website. They would get the same kind of IM as an in-world IM produces, but maybe there would be some indication the message is not from in-world. Someone in-world who receives that sort of message could reply while the link is open, but could not initiate a new IM to someone not in-world.

2: Ability to IM someone that you add to your 'Buddy List' here in the forums, when they are in-world, initiated from the website. This would work the same as my first option, as an additional level of capability, but gives you the ability to add a new possible recipient while on the website. This would especually be useful if you wanted to chat with a merchant or subject matter expert.

3: Ability to IM Anyone currently in-world, using a standard IM app like AOL ir ICQ, if you know their Second Life name. This would possibly work by allowing firstname.lastname.SL or some such to be a valid AOL or ICQ name. I would think this should be an opt-in item. To contact someone this way, they would have to indicate in their profile that they are willing to accept IM's from AOL or ICQ users who are not not in-world.

I don't think it would be necessary to be able to IM someone not in-world while you are in-world. If a SL person needs to do that, they can open an AOL or ICQ app seperately.



I also agree that it would be very useful if there was a way to retain IM history between logins. If I crash, or if I have to quit and log back in again to deal with something else, I lose all the IM history. It would be preferable for it to still be there. If I don't want an old IM history after login, I can open the IM history window and close that tab to clear it. Perhaps that could be a preference option, defaulting to 'don't save'. I could turn it on during 'important' IM sessions that I want to keep. Like when planning a complex project with someone.