Slashdot Mirror
The Balkanization of Chatting
JThaddeus writes "Slashdot's own (or former) CmdrTaco has a posting on the Washington Post's website where he discusses how chat apps have overtaken SMS. Yeah, they are cheap. There's no telecom fee per message or for some number of messages per month. However 'The problem of course is that these systems are annoyingly incompatible with each other. My phone can buzz with chat notifications from 3 different apps at any moment. My desktop has even more scattered across browser tabs and standalone apps.' Ditto, nor do I want to hassle learning some app or trying to understand its who's-listening settings. I'll stick to email and to occasional SMS."
IRC still loves you.
....fascinating. (arches eyebrow)
Back in the pre-SMS days, http://www.trillian.im/ Trillian did this nicely. You would think there would be an app to combine all as well. Couldn't be that hard if it's been done once before.
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Standards
Back in the day, there was *one* discussion forum: Usenet. It was everywhere, and all servers connected to it. Now, there are *thousands* of disconnected forums, dozens of "forum software packages", etcetera. Even systems that try to connect distinct forums (Disqus) aren't necessarily the most popular option.
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
considering that every carrier here has unlimited minutes/SMS plans by default
Jabber, ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Chat, IRC, entire websites devoted to nothing but realtime chat... did I see more of a problem back in the 90's than there actually was and now it really is a soul-destroying issue in 2013? Or is this just rehashing 15-year-old+ news?
I'm not sure you actually know what usenet is, and you either never use it or you forgot how it works (note the present tense.) There are moderated and unmoderated groups. The Linux Kernel Mailing List, which is used in the development of the Linux Kernel, is one example of a still thriving newsgroup.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
There are plenty of free newsgroup servers. Google is your friend! ... or at least their search engine is anyway ;-)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
No?
Yes, but Chat apps are priced closer to the way that the water coming out of your garden hose is. As opposed to SMS, which is priced like bottled water.
ACs posting Pedantic flaws in my metaphore in 3...2...1...
Infinite bucks per GB? SMS messages don't use bandwidth or data. They get carried in what is otherwise wasted padding in heartbeat packets. That's why they have a limited character length.
For sending text messages. Do you want to have ads? Do you want your chats monitored and your data sold? Do you want to pay a monthly, weekly per message fee for your messages that you send? A government who will offer the service for free, you pay for it in taxes.
For standard SMS text messages they get somehow added to your phone bill, I personally think they should be a LOT CHEAPER. But you do get a common protocol, because everyone else is doing it.
The other texting methods are incompatible with each other because they all have different rules on how they are funded and supported. The monetary gain must be related to the volume of the texting.
really then how come email does not suffer the same problem? It works on all platforms has free services that all work together, and has free clients with no adds. what is the difference here?
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The reason I use SMS and hope to use for a LONG time are the following:
1) No data plan needed. This means I am not tempted to go online all the time. So I just used a pre-payed card. Last top-up was 28/02 for 25 EUR. Still 15 EUR available
2) I can use it with the many people who do not have a smart phone. It just works.
3) Smart messaging. This means if I want to chit-chat, I SMS them where we can meet, we meet, have a few drinks and have an actual personal relationship.
4) Because it costs the other person to send something back, they don't send useless messages and most of the time just a message where we can meet.
And if smsing is not an option, you could, you know, use the device to, well telephone the other person and speak to them.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
really then how come email does not suffer the same problem? It works on all platforms has free services that all work together, and has free clients with no adds. what is the difference here?
The difference is that the email system was created before the internet was monetized, and the current chat systems except for irc were all created afterwards.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think this is just one part of a larger problem, which is that our communications are all fragmented.
Personally, I have 4 different email addresses that I actively use, as well as several that I don't use. I have 4 different IM accounts/protocols that I actively use. I have my cell phone, my work phone, and a Google Voice number, and voicemail for each. I have SMS via Google Voice and my phone directly, and then I also have iMessage on my phone, which arguably counts as a 5th IM account rather than SMS. I have membership and various forums and social networks. Through some of those social networks, I have even more email addresses and IM accounts. There may be even more accounts that I'm not thinking of.
So beyond the issue of SMS/chat, in that we have all these different incompatible and slightly different communications which don't work well together, and there isn't really a larger scheme to make it all coherent. I think Google may be the only company that's really trying to tackle the issue. They have been relatively successful in incorporating video, audio, and text chat with social networking. All that is tied in with Gmail and Google Voice under the same account, even though they're not really integrated yet. It'd be great if they could open APIs and protocols that allowed full interoperability with other services, e.g. if your friend could have Google+ and you have a Facebook account and a third friend sets up his own server, they can all still talk to each other and post on each others' walls.
But beyond that, I think we should be asking questions like: what's the difference between a IM message and SMS? Should you IM status be the same as a tweet? Where do you draw the line between a short blog post and a long Facebook status? What's the difference between sending an email and sending a IM to someone who is offline?
I would not only ask whether we need all these incompatible protocols, but whether we need all these different *kinds* of messages. Let's figure out which ones we really need, and then formulate standard protocols for distributing them.