I refuse to run MSN Messenger though. I just think it’s sufficiently insecure and closed source to be avoided. Most kids don’t know how MSN works, so they just do what their chat partner tells them to do. I’d rather my kids not install things just so they can get a neat smiley.

I also want to use protocols other than MSN. Jabber is used by a couple of my clients. I also want to experiment with VOIP. So I’ve selected GAIM as the multiprotocol instant messanger client around here. My kids can chat with friends and also with me when I’m travelling. GAIM supports AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Jabber, Google Talk, ICQ, Gadu-Gadu, and even IRC protocols in one client. That means I don’t need to run multiple clients just to chat for business or pleasure.

A friend of ours has a laptop that is so locked down by their Fortune 500 IT department that MSN won’t start. Which means she can’t chat to her daughter when she’s travelling. I’ve installed aMSN as an alternative. It’s a near perfect clone of MSN messanger, so the whole family knows how to use it immediately.

Update: My daughter was so impressed by aMSN she’s asked to install it on her desktop. We’ll see how it compares to the multiprotocol GAIM. Given all her friends are on MSN I’m worried that I may be forced to stick to MSN protocol when chatting to her.

Last year, a Flinders University study of 114 teenage students found that on average, they spent 13 hours a week online, and one-third were “in the process of becoming psychologically addicted” to the internet.

The study seems to be authored by Dr Mubarak Ali but the Google link to the Flinders site isn’t working at the moment, so I can’t verify if that pull quote is an accurate summary of his findings. I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt as smart people rarely say such stupid things.

I wonder if proto-sociologists found a similar percentage of kids were becoming psychologically addicted to writing, reading or hanging out? The Internet is a technology as well as a destination. Kids can spend just chatting in person, on the phone and now online in chatrooms and instant messages. Why does participating in such a developmentally normal behaviour create concern?

Someone compared the net to reading newspapers, magazines or novels. We don’t start panicing that our kids are reading too much.