IM Smarter is a new kind of instant messaging add-on service which allows full search of all your past instant messaging exchanges while providing a simple and effective IM-based personal notification service.

Go to www.IMSmarter.com to check it out.

While tech heads would label this an IM “proxy” service this is really a clever cross-platform solution to access and record all of your IM exchanges while getting instant notifications for anything that is of relevance to you.

Yes, other tools like Trillian (which I personally use) allow you to access any of the past exchanges with anyone among your buddies, but there is no global search facility to use.

IM Smarter doesn’t require you to change anything about your current IM habits - after a thirty-second configuration (not requiring you to install any software), you are set to go.

IM Smarter works with AIM, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, MSN Messenger, iChat, Trillian and across Windows, Mac OS/X, and Linux!

IM Smarter does not simply plan to provide a logging service for all of your IM exchanges but is really focusing on notifications and alerts: "the next major release (internally: Release Seven) we’ll be deploying a rich notification architecture to let you know not only when your buddies update their websites, but when news likely to be of interest to you is happening; or when your package status changes with UPS or FedEx."

IM Smarter is a Cluetrain company and it DOES listen closely to its users, which express concerns, requests for new features and new ideas in a publicly accessible forum available here: http://forums.imsmarter.com/.

Just like blogs, and in some ways RSS or P2P, instant messaging "has been kind of a second-class citizen, a bastard child of cyberspace. Business has understood and embraced email, but IM is viewed as a kind of renegade thing; something that needs to be monitored, controlled, and suppressed."

"When I first started getting into the IM enhancement market I was amazed to find a plethora of services offering centralized logging, none of which actually provided any value to the people whose messages were being logged! The “features” could *only* be used against you and couldn’t help you do anything. They were only for corporate compliance. While there’s good money in that market, I’d rather write non-evil software. I wanted to make something that could enhance people’s IM experience and make IM a mature first-class Internet citizen with a service that really changes the way that people look at IM."

IM Smarter does relay all of the IM exchanges of its subscribers through its servers and as such is liable to treat personal data and logs of IM exchanges away from prying eyes. In this respect the company appears to be solidly on the side of the users and does state to provide full privacy protection measures to all its users. A comprehensive public privacy policy is also available here. Any user can delete the whole of its chat history at any time.

While the technology and the whole idea brought forward by IM Smarter deserve all of my support, according to my initial testing and probably due to the overload the service is receiving after having just been Slashdotted, I don't recommend to try the tool yet. Give it a few more days and everything should be fine. Unless you are a geek, for now the negative surprises may surpass the positive ones. So do applaud the idea and approach but wait before giving it a spin.

IM Smarter is free.

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Coceve™ (co-: together + conceive: to form or develop in the mind = helping people think smarter together), the company behind IM Smarter, was founded by David Weekly in late 2003 to make next-generation tools for assisting collaboration over the Internet. Coceve was funded with two "micro-angel" investment rounds from friends and family. Coceve is a privately held California corporation with no intent on IPO. Our goal is simply to work hard, be cunning, and bring in sizeably more money than we spend by providing the best collaboration tools the Internet has to offer.