The future of instant messaging

2007-07-29

I use the internet all the time. About 20% of my internet usage involves searching for some kind of encyclopaedic info (dictionaries included). Another 20% consists of mostly random funny or interesting things, like reddit, digg, links from friends. And finally, communication with other people makes up around 60%.

I sometimes do write emails, but mostly just use various forms of instant text messaging to talk to my buddies. I have tried voice over ip (skype, to be concrete), and I have to admit that it is very useful… that is, if you don’t need to talk to more than one person at a time.

Which brings me to my main point: when talking to my pals using instant messaging, I often talk to many (more than five) people simultaneously. Although this sometimes leads to delays (errm, nope, my 6 hour delays are not caused by communication overload but simply by me not noticing you ;-)), it is still quite manageable once you get used to it.

It is technically impossible to achieve the same level of paralelity in voice based communication. Sure, you could receive the voice messages one after another, and respond them, but it would break the flow. In instant messaging, you can see the last few lines of a conversation, which reminds you about what was going on. Also, in case you need to retrieve some info from the past, skimming through chatlogs is much easier than listening to all the voice messages.

Simply put, I don’t want to receive voice messages, I want to receive text messages.

Now how about the input? This is where many posibilities arise for the future. Voice input (transformed into a text message) seems to be the easiest and the most viable option for the near future. However, it does have some pitfalls, and I personally feel more comfortable using my keyboard.

Another option would be controlling input by thought. Or… maybe not. Imagine you are talking to a girl or… oh well, that was definitely a bad idea.

So to sum it up, I think the future of text messaging is still rather bright. I can’t imagine anything replacing text output. The input part is a bit unclear, but I don’t really care about it all that much anyway.

Discuss.
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Please?
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Pretty please?

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