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