On 2005-03-03T11:52:59+0000, ken wrote: > > >Chat is already higher volume (I read somewhere) in > >raw quantity of messages sent than email. > > I suspect you don't get much traffic. The beauty of a > non-real-time store-and-forward system like smtp (or SMS, or > oldstyle conferencing systems with off-line readers) is precisely > that it can be automated. I don't have to see mail I don't want.
You don't have to see IMs you don't want, either. You can refuse them from people not on your buddy list. > >A fate for email is that as spam grows to take over more > >of the share of the shrinking pie, but consumes more of > >the bandwidth > > A higher proportion of the snail-mail I get is junk than the email. > > A higher proportion of the landline phone calls I get are junk. At > least 4 out of 5 calls, maybe 9 out of 10. Email is doing quite well. With 3 or 4 RBL blacklists, greylisting, and making sure senders don't ehlo with my ip address, I don't even have to use dspam or Spamassassin I get so little spam. > A serious proportion of the rootkits and so on that have been plaguing > us for the last few years involves chat & instant messaging & so on. > I'd block it at the boundary firewall. People who use it should just > learn how to use mail. They'd get through more. Chat is for > functional illiterates. Learn to read at adult speed and you'll prefer > mail. Why should they put up with being limited to someone else's > typing speed? I don't think email will disappear either, but IM is good for 2-way conversations. Helping someone debug a problem via email gets tedious very quickly. Strangely enough, a good number of people I've talked to over the phone have had their IQ drop by about 100 points when I start using a phonetic alphabet to spell things. I usually end up having to repeat the phonetic spelling several times; it's really strange. IM eliminates that whole problem. Unless communicating in a standard, often-spoken language, phones lose their utility. There's a place for both IM and email. I agree, though, that IM may suffer from a poor S/N ratio. -- Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter. --Hemingway, Esquire, April 1936
