Communication

You may have noticed that I added a Meebo IM tool to NSL recently. I'd been talking to a faculty friend of mine about the expectations of students, specifically that they expect their instructors to be available to them 24/7. My friend was bemoaning the lack of "downtime" this creates. Which got me to thinking about the potential for holding "office hours" via IM. Many libraries do reference via IM (there's been a discussion recently on the LIBREF listserv about the advantages and disadvanteges of Meebo) but I haven't heard or read much about using IM for office hours. Has anyone out there? I like Meebo because it doesn't require me to download any software and because it "talks" to a variety of IM services like AIM, Yahoo!, ICQ, and Google. Anyhow, I thought I'd give it a try.