It's fun catching up with a few thousand unread messages in your RSS feed reader. Really. By processing a ton at once, you tend to see more dots to be joined.
Ben Hyde comments on how markets are likely to form around achieving just the right level of interruption by our communications tools.
Zimran Ahmed suggests that personal productivity (the real thing, not a marketing pitch) is the Next Big Thing. (This one is also worth reading.)
All this leads me to think that we do indeed face a gaping hole in the level of sophistication of our communications tools. For instance, none of my online tools can currently detect I'm writing a blog entry; Windows lacks an API for the application to declare some meta-data about what the user is doing and how interruptible they might be. We're still doing good imitations of telephony, rather than re-working things from the ground up. Why can't I talk dispersed friends and family through the pictures I took on holiday, and then have anyone who couldn't make the show come back and flip through the picture album, synced in with the audio track?
By having a broad portfolio of online productivity and data management tools, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft have a fighting chance of creating this next level of presence and interruption management. But it only works as long as you stay within the walled garden. It's a plausible story, if not a very exciting one. Instead of hundreds of millions of Skypers, we get more of the same plodding progress out of the IM networks.
Skype is dependent on getting embedded in other people's contexts and acting as a presence broker between them. The API offers more flexibility than the monumental offerings of the older IM nets. For instance, I just signed up to a trial account at the Ecademy social networking service, and it would be nice to be able to "click to Skype" without having to add people into my buddy list, yet whilst also retaining the functionality of both Skype and Ecademy. So don't let people hassle me when I'm busy, but if I'm just cruising Boing Boing, fire away. (Your traditional "Click to IM me" presence-colored Yahoo web icon doesn't cut it, as I can't express a preference for "reject calls from all strangers except Ecademy users".) You can cut a bizdev deal with the IM nets to do a lot of this stuff, but the API just makes getting permission to tinker a whole lot simpler.
One reason I'm increasingly using IM is that it doesn't leave the "faux to-do" trail of email; I don't need to delete/file messages as if each is potentially an action item. This is a genuine increase in productivity. Many people use Skype because they are bound to a laptop yet are very mobile, and it just self-configures to every network environment. It's more productive than Ye Olde IM, which tried to inherit too much configuration from your web browser, or was static and required change every time you flipped from being at work to being at home or in the coffee shop.
But we're still aeons away from realising the full potential of integrating personal communications and personal productivity. Our next step in our onward march to cyborgdom awaits!
Posted by Martin Geddes at 12:27 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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