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I don't understand the handwringing over too many messaging systems and their notifications. The smartphone is the messaging centre where we coordinate our ele

by mafribe 10y ago

I don't understand the handwringing over too many messaging systems and their notifications. The smartphone is the messaging centre where we coordinate our electronically mediated communication. Whether you get 7 notifications from different 7 apps or 7 notifications from 1 app should not make a difference from the point of view of attention spent, focus lost, time wasted. The following communication pattern has emerged for me, without any design on my side: Snap: frivolous and fun Whatsapp: family, European friends, the Toyota/VW of messaging LINE: Asian friends Skype: high priority work stuff Email: low priority work stuff Insta: friends boasting about their life ;) In other words, different apps function as a way of categorising messages. I find this siloing convenient. Siloing reduces the risk of sharing the wrong kind of message with the wrong kind of person, which has been a great problem with unified messaging systems (e.g. Facebook, or Google's centralisation of all accounts when they introduced G+). As these different messaging systems are (simplifying a bit) fungible, and it is near frictionless to switch between them on a modern smartphone, the phone (it's number or IMEI) is the new dominant form of electronically addressable social identity. This should worry the Facebooks, Snapchats, Whatsapps etc of this world, because the network effects which is the driving force behind their business models has been weakened to a considerable degree. In summary: I welcome the widespread use of heterogeneous messaging and notification apps on the phone, it makes my life easier and safer.

mrweasel 10y ago
>I don't understand the handwringing over too many messaging systems and their notifications. Your point isn't unreasonable, it's just that may of these services doesn't have the same filtering capabilities that something like has. Snapchat and Instagram, yeah that pretty safe to ignore, but many simply can't. They're "flashing" to get your attention, the systems are designed that way. Sure, maybe people should "just have more willpower", most of us don't though. I noticed that you left out things like Facebook and Twitter, where it's hard to know if it going to be important, before you check. Personally, my rules for communicating: Email - It might be important, but not time critical in any way. My preferred form of communicating in general. SMS - I might get back to you, I may not. SMS is for "just letting you know" sort of things. Phone call - It's important, or you need feedback/have questions. I'm not going to waste time texting or emailing back and forth if it can be resolved by a 2 minute phone call. Everything else is: Don't expect me to react to this. I still feel that with all newer forms of communicating it's pretty hard to beat either a phone call or email.
- mafribe 10y ago
  it's pretty hard to beat either a phone call or email. I like email too, but it's difficult to reach young people this way. They may not even have email addresses. In my world, phonecalls now have primarily two purposes: emergencies (XYZ had an accident, come to hospital immediately) and communicating with the very old, so I rarely use it anymore. Everything else is: That would not fly in my milieu. Many things are organised via Whatsapp/LINE etc. I'd become an outcaste if I ignored this.
  - mrweasel 10y ago
    >That would not fly in my milieu. That's really the key. I might prefer email, but I'm the only one in my group of friends and family that works that way. SMS is the preferred choice for my family and Facebook for anyone else. In most cases you just need to accept that the people you need to communicate with may have other preferences. I would be surprised to find that someone didn't have an email address though. Don't you still need that for signing up for most services? Whether someone check their email or not is a different story of cause.
  - arkades 10y ago
    > I like email too, but it's difficult to reach young people this way. I gifted my 13yo niece a year of Spotify recently and, to create her account, they required an email address. She looks at me half-confused. "I can just use my usual, right?" "Sure," I say, a bit confused by the question and watching to see what that means. Turns out in her peer group they all use 10 minute expiring emails from various free net services. Gmail is something they just hold onto for notifications from school and older relatives.
kirkdouglas 10y ago
The problem is that sometimes you don't pick messaging apps you use, your friends/relatives/coworkers do. So to communicate with them you have to use what they use. For example, I don't like Skype, but it's used by some people I want to have connection with and they have no plans to switch/use something else.
- mafribe 10y ago
  Exactly. For me the pattern is: I subscribe to any new social / communication service and see what happens. Probably because I work in IT, I'm an early adopter, and when I first subscribe to a service, I have nobody to talk to, and I let the app 'simmer'. With most services this never changes, but occasionally one of them makes it big, and all of a sudden 'everybody' in some group that I participate in uses the service. My social world mostly self-selects into neat silos, e.g. Europeans rarely use LINE, older people rarely use Snap, and I amplify this tendency by judicious choice of whom I communicate with over which channel, e.g. work contacts don't get on my Snap. I learned from the Facebook disaster. The smooth interface of a modern smartphone makes switching between different apps near seamless, so I really don't care which one I use. They are all good enough for me. Each app is completely fungible, and if one of them disappears, we switch to another one. So the network effect is still there, in that an app is as useful as it has members, but there is no longer a strong lock-in. I'm quite happy with how this has turned out.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
As a "messaging centre where we coordinate our electronically mediated communication" a smartphone would be infinitely more useful if there was one app for all that communication. Keeping track of which people you communicate over which app, which conversations happened where, not to mention with huge interface and functionality differences (e.g. you can search e-mail for old conversations, you can barely do some rudimentary searches on Facebook Messenger (at least through the desktop web interface), but I don't believe you can do that at all on e.g. Instagram or Snapchat) and close to zero interoperability - this all creates a big and unnecessary cognitive load, and is very suboptimal. Call me spoiled, but I think modern OSes - not just mobile, but desktop too - force way too little in terms of UX. That's why on my computers I like to route everything text-related through Emacs. That joke about it being an "operating system" is actually a compliment. It gives you a very big set of operations that are consistent for all tasks that involve any kind of text. But barring Emacs-OS for mobile phones, I'd settle for a decent dashboard that could efficiently summarize all messaging channels in one place, and allow easy interop between them.
- CPLX 10y ago
  One could make a reasonable argument that the smartphone is the "one app" of which you speak.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    It, or rather its OS, should be. But just like desktop OSes, I feel it doesn't enforce enough interoperability beteween applications and uniformity of UX.
  - mafribe 10y ago
    Exactly. And the phone number and/or the IMEI is the technological identifier that ties all our identities together.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      Multi-SIM phones. Non-SIM (Wifi-only) phones. Multiple phone-users. There is no universal identifier. I may absolutely insist there isn't. And I strongly suspect phone tech (number-based dialing) is on its way out. For all the reasons Mossberg states, the one app I hate most is the phone, and I don't have one. Haven't for years. There are phones by which I can occasionally be reached. There's a mobile phone which occasionally has service. Both are highly deprecated.
dredmorbius 10y ago
A centralised messaging tool provides a centralised messaging policy. You can enforce filters, access rules, quiet times, etc., among these. A centralised messaging tool provides a centralised messaging archive. If you want to find something, you can search one place, one time, with consistent syntax. You don't have to scramble through a half-dozen or more services to find crap. A centralised messaging tool offers a standard interface. Even if it's dealing with systems which have their own capabilities, your editors, shortcuts, contacts, etc., are in one place. A centralised messaging tool offers you central control over your contact lists. Fuck any app that wants my contacts list. Just completely, totally, 100% fuck it. For starters, that's not my information to give. You can pile on any number of privacy-and-security based arguments on top of that. In the IM days, there was a set of autonomous systems that evolved: ICQ, YIM, AIM, MSM, Jabber, etc., etc., etc. And eventually, single unified clients which could speak all of them. Or turn all of them the fuck off in one go. We're moving backward.

by mafribe 10y ago

mrweasel 10y ago

>I don't understand the handwringing over too many messaging systems and their notifications. Your point isn't unreasonable, it's just that may of these services doesn't have the same filtering capabilities that something like has. Snapchat and Instagram, yeah that pretty safe to ignore, but many simply can't. They're "flashing" to get your attention, the systems are designed that way. Sure, maybe people should "just have more willpower", most of us don't though. I noticed that you left out things like Facebook and Twitter, where it's hard to know if it going to be important, before you check. Personally, my rules for communicating: Email - It might be important, but not time critical in any way. My preferred form of communicating in general. SMS - I might get back to you, I may not. SMS is for "just letting you know" sort of things. Phone call - It's important, or you need feedback/have questions. I'm not going to waste time texting or emailing back and forth if it can be resolved by a 2 minute phone call. Everything else is: Don't expect me to react to this. I still feel that with all newer forms of communicating it's pretty hard to beat either a phone call or email.

mafribe 10y ago
it's pretty hard to beat either a phone call or email. I like email too, but it's difficult to reach young people this way. They may not even have email addresses. In my world, phonecalls now have primarily two purposes: emergencies (XYZ had an accident, come to hospital immediately) and communicating with the very old, so I rarely use it anymore. Everything else is: That would not fly in my milieu. Many things are organised via Whatsapp/LINE etc. I'd become an outcaste if I ignored this.
- mrweasel 10y ago
  >That would not fly in my milieu. That's really the key. I might prefer email, but I'm the only one in my group of friends and family that works that way. SMS is the preferred choice for my family and Facebook for anyone else. In most cases you just need to accept that the people you need to communicate with may have other preferences. I would be surprised to find that someone didn't have an email address though. Don't you still need that for signing up for most services? Whether someone check their email or not is a different story of cause.
- arkades 10y ago
  > I like email too, but it's difficult to reach young people this way. I gifted my 13yo niece a year of Spotify recently and, to create her account, they required an email address. She looks at me half-confused. "I can just use my usual, right?" "Sure," I say, a bit confused by the question and watching to see what that means. Turns out in her peer group they all use 10 minute expiring emails from various free net services. Gmail is something they just hold onto for notifications from school and older relatives.

kirkdouglas 10y ago

The problem is that sometimes you don't pick messaging apps you use, your friends/relatives/coworkers do. So to communicate with them you have to use what they use. For example, I don't like Skype, but it's used by some people I want to have connection with and they have no plans to switch/use something else.

mafribe 10y ago
Exactly. For me the pattern is: I subscribe to any new social / communication service and see what happens. Probably because I work in IT, I'm an early adopter, and when I first subscribe to a service, I have nobody to talk to, and I let the app 'simmer'. With most services this never changes, but occasionally one of them makes it big, and all of a sudden 'everybody' in some group that I participate in uses the service. My social world mostly self-selects into neat silos, e.g. Europeans rarely use LINE, older people rarely use Snap, and I amplify this tendency by judicious choice of whom I communicate with over which channel, e.g. work contacts don't get on my Snap. I learned from the Facebook disaster. The smooth interface of a modern smartphone makes switching between different apps near seamless, so I really don't care which one I use. They are all good enough for me. Each app is completely fungible, and if one of them disappears, we switch to another one. So the network effect is still there, in that an app is as useful as it has members, but there is no longer a strong lock-in. I'm quite happy with how this has turned out.

TeMPOraL 10y ago

As a "messaging centre where we coordinate our electronically mediated communication" a smartphone would be infinitely more useful if there was one app for all that communication. Keeping track of which people you communicate over which app, which conversations happened where, not to mention with huge interface and functionality differences (e.g. you can search e-mail for old conversations, you can barely do some rudimentary searches on Facebook Messenger (at least through the desktop web interface), but I don't believe you can do that at all on e.g. Instagram or Snapchat) and close to zero interoperability - this all creates a big and unnecessary cognitive load, and is very suboptimal. Call me spoiled, but I think modern OSes - not just mobile, but desktop too - force way too little in terms of UX. That's why on my computers I like to route everything text-related through Emacs. That joke about it being an "operating system" is actually a compliment. It gives you a very big set of operations that are consistent for all tasks that involve any kind of text. But barring Emacs-OS for mobile phones, I'd settle for a decent dashboard that could efficiently summarize all messaging channels in one place, and allow easy interop between them.

CPLX 10y ago
One could make a reasonable argument that the smartphone is the "one app" of which you speak.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  It, or rather its OS, should be. But just like desktop OSes, I feel it doesn't enforce enough interoperability beteween applications and uniformity of UX.
- mafribe 10y ago
  Exactly. And the phone number and/or the IMEI is the technological identifier that ties all our identities together.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Multi-SIM phones. Non-SIM (Wifi-only) phones. Multiple phone-users. There is no universal identifier. I may absolutely insist there isn't. And I strongly suspect phone tech (number-based dialing) is on its way out. For all the reasons Mossberg states, the one app I hate most is the phone, and I don't have one. Haven't for years. There are phones by which I can occasionally be reached. There's a mobile phone which occasionally has service. Both are highly deprecated.

dredmorbius 10y ago

A centralised messaging tool provides a centralised messaging policy. You can enforce filters, access rules, quiet times, etc., among these. A centralised messaging tool provides a centralised messaging archive. If you want to find something, you can search one place, one time, with consistent syntax. You don't have to scramble through a half-dozen or more services to find crap. A centralised messaging tool offers a standard interface. Even if it's dealing with systems which have their own capabilities, your editors, shortcuts, contacts, etc., are in one place. A centralised messaging tool offers you central control over your contact lists. Fuck any app that wants my contacts list. Just completely, totally, 100% fuck it. For starters, that's not my information to give. You can pile on any number of privacy-and-security based arguments on top of that. In the IM days, there was a set of autonomous systems that evolved: ICQ, YIM, AIM, MSM, Jabber, etc., etc., etc. And eventually, single unified clients which could speak all of them. Or turn all of them the fuck off in one go. We're moving backward.