Honestly that's my point (and perhaps I should have been more clear about it). I think in hindsight I vastly prefer synchronous chat- which is why I pointed ou

Honestly that's my point (and perhaps I should have been more clear about it). I think in hindsight I vastly prefer synchronous chat- which is why I pointed out in the beginning that AIM was the closest online communication to in-person communication. With asynchronous communication you do need to be much more proactive in how you handle your 'threads'. As I mentioned before, you need to remember or decide to reply _eventually_. It's also possible that in the meantime your thread (basically 1:1 communication with a person) will fork off (i.e. you share a tweet with someone in Twitter while simultaneously having an asynchronous conversation about some other topic in iMessages).