I first started using four years ago. I was just out of high school, a freshman in college, just beginning to experiment with my newfound independence. Some of the other kids were doing it and it looked like fun. Pretty soon I was doing it too and doing it all: AIM, MSN, Yahoo, all of them. I would spend hours juggling digital conversations, some of them happy, some of them sad, some witty, some a little too early in the morning to be witty. I got the the point where I could carry on four or five convos at a time without breaking a sweat. And then there was the contact lists. I think that I had an IM address for everybody I met over a 9 month period. It was pretty much my popularity index. I felt a connection with the world around me, so long as that world was the cramped little boxes I would type my conversations into.

Just like any addiction, IM addiction has its dangers. For instance, I was laying on my bed in my dorm room after throwing out my back while carrying a 27-inch TV into somebody else’s room. As a lay in my pain-induced haze, a group of kids busted into my room. The ringleader called me out, saying that someone had been trashing him over IM and that a mutual friend of ours had identified the offending address as mine. Through a series of events too strange and wonderful to mention, disaster was averted and the gentleman left me to suffer in peace. Such are the hazards of being deep in the IM world.

These types of experiences haven’t deterred me, though. I still allow my life to be run by the little MSN man on my toolbar. There are less and less of us these days, but we’re still hanging tough and engaging in pixelated interaction.

Now for what I really wanted to write about.
*Warning- Classified Chat Acronyms*
I think that my favorite part of the IM scene is the fully little acronyms that every IM savvy conversant knows. A few of my favorites:

LOL-laughing out loud
TTYL- Talk to you later
BRB- Be right back
NP- No problem
GTG- Got to go
IANAL- I am not a lawyer

Again, this is just a few. Of course, this begs the question what is to keep people from turning anything and everything into an acronym? I mean, really, in the most extreme case, you could try to have an entire conversation just typing the first letter of every word. Sure, this completely eradicates any possiblity of true communication, but maybe it will start a new revolution in IM-ing. It could be some kind of game, trying to decipher what your friends are saying. So…
IGPLAIPT,SIGTGTBBIHWT.IKTTPIPL,BMSOFWPWLAI.LMKIYDTATFVTI.