I am struck by the fragmentation in communication mechanisms. Let’s look at how I have communicated with my friends in the past few days:

  • Phone call
    Tried and tested, though I tend to avoid them. I’ve made some deliberate calls to sort out immediate plans, and at least one accidental call caused by user error which resulted in talking to someone it was good to hear from
  • Text message
    Again, reasonably tried and tested. I miss the inability to use Google Voice when I’m in the UK; I’d much rather read and compose text messages from my web browser when I’m near a computer than type them on my phone, even if it does have a keyboard.
  • Email
    One of my favourite methods of communication. Suitable for quick messages or longer screeds. I can throw links in and expect you to be able to click them. I can put lots of detail so that everything is covered easily. I can confuse you by quoting correctly. I guess while I do read email on my phone I’m less likely to reply there as I’m always a bit embarrassed how the clients cope with replies.
  • IRC
    Like, I suspect, many readers of my blog posts, I’m still a daily user of IRC. There are friends I keep in touch with mostly via this method. It’s great. It’s like Twitter for old people and much better in many ways.
  • Skype
    This started out as a work thing. It was the way in which the Belfast office communicated with the US, it become the way the Belfast office communicated with each other and when I moved on it was the way in which I kept in contact with a group of people I consider good friends. It’s great for calls (I feel bad saying that, but it’s an idea executed well across multiple platforms and any other VOIP stuff I’ve played with has been much more of a hassle), but the one to one and group chat functionality is pretty spot on as well. Also has the advantage that I can turn it off and mostly not end up with work queries.
  • Google Hangouts
    I actually quite like these. They work on my phone, I can poke them from a web browser, I can dump more than just text into them. IRC is better in some ways, but I do like the additional flexibility I get from a Hangout. It doesn’t play well with people who haven’t drunk the Google koolaid, which is the main reason I haven’t managed to convince the Skype group chat group to move it over here.
  • Facebook messenger
    I hate this. On the face of it there’s not a lot of difference between it and Hangouts, but the app wants more and more privileges, I’m less likely to be logged into Facebook (e.g. I avoid it at work, whereas there are good reasons I’d be logged into my Google account there, though less so since the demise of Reader) and I don’t think it’s as nicely implemented. However there are a few people who it’s easiest to get hold of via this method. And there’s a certain amount of mesmerisation by the floaty wee faces it invokes on my phone.

While some of these work better for me than others really what I’d like is to use fewer of them, and I can’t see that happening any time soon. I don’t want to have to run a handful of different messaging apps on my phone. I also don’t want to be limited to only using my laptop or my phone for something - I’d much prefer to be able to pickup the phone, laptop or tablet depending on what I’m up to and have my full range of communication available. Some of these things can be aggregated together, but that will then lose some of the advantages. And I’m sure that even if I got rid of one or two of the above there’d be something to fill the gap along shortly (I have, for example, so far completely avoided WhatsApp).