Where do you say what you have to say

So many means of communication, where is it all going?

There are tons of instant messaging tools today. We can choose between Whatsapp, GMail chat, FB chat, an email, a phone call and a few other means of communication.

It wasn’t always like that and I am not sure how the future will look.

At the early 2000-s you either called someone, texted or emailed him. That was most of the options to communicate. Oh wait, you had ICQ too and actually Skype too, now that I recall. Well, it seems we live in hyper-communicated era for a while now.

Today, we have much more means of communication and it is only growing. Will it ever stop? There were a few failing attempts to unify all messaging platforms (put some links here) but it just doesn’t work. It is true that some platforms have no API and so they can’t be unified, but essentially it is not a technical problem — there’s just something broken about this concept. There’s a good reason why we like so many different communication channels and I’m eager to understand why and where is this going to.

I just sent an important email a few days ago and never got a reply. I had to nudge my friend/colleague/recipient on FB to get his attention and immediate response. Cool. A few days later I just sent a Private Message to another recipient on FB just to be asked to use email medium for this. So I emailed ;-)

It is a while now that I’m asking myself — when should I use each platform? I am connected to so many people over so many platforms.

When I reach someone on FB it’s very informal, when I reach him on LinkedIn — it’s all about business. On email it can be anything, but do I email his private email address or his business one? This is so confusing!

I thought about starting up a joke-website with a serious of questions that allows you to better understand which communication channel to use:

Are you going to send a business related message?
Do you know your recipient from before?
Is the recipient a friend?
How long is your message?
Can you shorten your message to a one-liner ?
How emotional is your message?
Is your message funny?
Are you expecting a long reply?
Do you want an immediate response?
Do you believe you will receive an immediate response?
Will using the tones of your voice improve the message you want to deliver?
From the moment you get a response, how important is it you’ll respond quickly?

You could probably think of a dozen more questions. I remember many times calling abroad (and paying a bunch) instead of Skyping — because I didn’t want to waste time of coordinating a Skype call or because I wanted to show I didn’t care about long-distance calling price.

What is the future holding for us? New devices, new platforms, new social networks. Holograms? More YO-Like apps?

A friend of mine suggested it should come from another approach. from the recipient’s end:

it should be called: howshouldicontactyou.com

so you go to howshouldicontactyou.com/dorkalev

and then categories:

for Business use Email

for Friends use Facebook

for ______ use ______

But I don’t really know how I want anyone to contact me. I don’t really care actually. When do I care? I only care when I need time to recess and think before I respond.

For farther discussion on this subject, feel free to YO! me ;-)