Yesterday I got curious:
My initial count was five, but released I missed some with the responses that I received. In a ‘general’ sorting of most common to least from my (admittedly small) sample set, the available contact methods are:
- Email (always multiple accounts per person)
- Instant Messaging (MSN, AOL, etc.) (usually multiple per person)
- Twitter (often multiple accounts)
- Skype
- VoiP
- IRC
- Google Wave
Which seems to be a lot, and from the responses I seem to be behind the curve in contactability. All this makes me wonder, in a world where outdated and not updated client applications are a growing intrusion vector do we really need all these ways for people and systems to communicate with us?
While you’re thinking, are they any of your communication tools that you could do without? If you stopped signing into MSN (for example) would you lose contact with anyone who couldn’t contact you via a different communication channel?
I’m not sure if there is a purpose to these thoughts or the very unscientific findings, but I’ve been thinking about this for a while so thought I’d share.
</ramblings>
— Andrew Waite
P.S. thanks to those who participated, you know who you are.