Despite being regarded as the work of the devil by employers across the world, instant messaging clients are increasingly being used to improve productivity. We’ve all been guilty of wasting the odd hour or three chatting drivel to friends via instant messaging, but you can now use the technology to improve the way you work and manage your tasks more effectively.
IMified is a neat new web application that lets you use your favourite messenger to add notes, reminders, and blog entries to a site or a supported service. There’s no sign-up required and using the service is as simple as sending a message to a designated IM account before accessing the special menu to execute a variety of commands.
Using Yahoo! Messenger, I managed to access and post to Basecamp, Google Calendars and Backpack without so much as looking at a browser icon. IMified also lets you add blog entries to services such as Blogger, Moveable Type, TypePad and WordPress through your IM client, and it’s all surprisingly simple too, walking you through a series of menu options for one-off configuration.
It seems that the IMified team have had some teething problems getting their software to work smoothly with MSN but that aside, I was pretty impressed with IMified. It’s difficult to see it become adopted on a wide scale for blogging, as its editing capabilities are pretty limited. That said, the developer promises a paid-for service if the service takes off, which may signal the start of a shift in what we do with our instant messengers.
