I’ve noticed a change in they way I’ve been communicating with people in my extended community online.
Now this is not a trend I’m seeing with everyone online or that would spread to the general populous ant time soon, but it is definitely spreading to those that build and use the web on a day-to-day basis.
Personal web pages have given way to the mighty blog, though social networks are claiming a little of that back now, and video use seems to be on the rise with sites such as Y!Live, DialedIn etc. though it still seems a little too much like a fad.
Daily communications are the things that I have seen the most change in and the delivery methods are in a state of flux.
Tweet!
I’ve mentioned my initial reception to twitter before, but since adopting Snitter I find myself using it more and more. I’ve tried organizing lunch meetings through it which didn’t go to well (eh, Joe) and ended up using the phone. So for long-term planning (are you going to XYZ next week?) and general communication I find Twitter does fine. Also the fact that this is easily used with portable devices, like mobile phones, only adds to it's adoption.
IM
I was a bit of a hold-out on IM initially too (see a pattern?) but internally it proved a very good method of communicating between the coders & designers here. Since moving to different digs the use has dropped off as none of the account teams seem to use it that much. I still keep it open & have found Trillian a great tool for managing the different connections including IRC.
Email=EFAIL
This (for me) originated from a tweet I saw by Tantek Çelik. He’s since backed it up by a blog post expanding his view on this. Now I don’t agree with everything put forward there, but as with everything, it’s a reaction to how you use the tools or how they are used at you.
This sparked me to view Merlin Manns’ Inbox Zero video. It’s well worth watching and since trying the method out today, seems very effective.
Now I don’t think we’ll ever be free of email or that we’ll be doing important client communication via Twitter, but I do think as more of these alternatives seep into every day adoption within companies and the space where we do business continues to shrink - we’ll see email’s sense of immediacy erode and more general discussion moving over to a new medium.
Technorati tags: communication, twitter, email=efail, im, web, social networks
