iChat lets people know I'm too sexy

A couple weeks ago I finally got myself up and running with Apple's chat client that was packaged in with my MacBook Pro. iChat makes my instant messaging life simpler, as you would expect from a company like Apple.

I used to have to load up AOL's Instant Messenger (AIM) in addition to keep a web browser window open for my Google Chat contacts. Maybe there was an easier way at the time on the old PC but I did not know what it was. So to make my computer life easier I pretty much stopped using AIM all together. This was a rather big decision for me as I had been using the AOL chat system since I was in seventh grade when my family first got America Online (and I promptly ran a bill up to more than $90 chatting away with friends from school - ahh the days of pay by the minute or hour). AIM was something that followed me all through out high school and college and was the ultimate way to keep in touch with people and send quick updates for my purposes.

Since taking over the role of National College Football Examiner on Examiner.com I found myself wanting to make myself more accessible to fellow writers and college football contacts. Hence my return to AIM. But I also wanted to keep using Google Chat so I needed a way to make things more organized.

Enter iChat.

Tucked away in the applications that came with my MacBook Pro was the iChat software. Using iChat I can easily sign in to multiple chat clients and manage them with ease. When I am working I typically sign in to iChat, which automatically signs me in to AIM and Google Chat at the same time. If I need to step away form the computer and want people to know I will be right back I do not need to set up separate away messages. In iChat you can set up one single away message that can be used for all of your open accounts.

One feature I particularly found interesting was the ability to keep a running status message that displays what I am listening to in iTunes. In this age of social networking and communicating I thought this would be an interesting feature to use. Perhaps somebody would see that I was listening to an episode of On the DL or This Week in Tech and decide to check it out themselves. Or maybe somebody I was chatting with would be interested in checking out the Shaimus album I was jamming (er... working) too.

That was the idea at least.

But the other day I realized that I may not want to be broadcasting this information to everyone.

I generally listen to my iTunes library on random after I listen to my desired podcasts, so I never know what is going to pop up at any given moment. So when "I'm Too Sexy" comes on from a 90's party CD I ripped the whole world would be able to see it. What would they think of me then? I mean, I only ripped the CD so I could have Will Smith and DJ Jazzy Jeff's Summertime on my computer. Is that so wrong?

It was also brought to my attention that the constant status updates can come across as annoying...


I have no shame. But I did turn off my iTunes status updates.