Call it what you want, twets, email, or IM. They are all micro messages that replace face-to-face or personalized means of human communication. In product development it is clear why messaging has replaced face-to-face. Co-located cross-functional teams have been ripped apart by outsourcing, corporate mergers, budget cuts and the beleif distributed teams work just fine. At the same time product complexity has increased and timelines and budgets have been reduced. Face-to-face team meetings are gone, replaced by constant micro messages that stream into inboxes everywhere and ever part of our lives. “I copied you on the mail”, “Didn’t you read what I sent”, “My inbox is full” or “I haven’t done email yet” are all things we find ourselves saying everyday…
Can constant messages streaming onto your desktop replace a face-to-face team meeting? Do all these messages become to much information? How do I find something when I want versus when someone wanted to send it? Development teams everywhere are scratching their collective heads on these questions. No matter the answers it is is clear that electronic messaging is here to stay! The question is how do we best utilize it?
Have you ever been looking at your inbox, today mine has 1245 items, and wondered which ones do I care about? Or which ones are about what I am working on? Or how many people have stopped deleting message, just in case they need them later?
The problem I see is not way you communicate, but way you get what you need (when you need it). What will happen with 12321… “unread tweets”
? The problem is the same as unread mail. Last trend I see on twitter is to create groups (this is similar to mailing list), but just natural step to reduce message/mail/communication over-load. The key to resolve it is to have “contextual” type of communication. So, I expect better news from service like vuuch in context of design discussion.
On average I now have anywhere from 200-300 unread messages every day, and about another 500 that I’ve read that I might need to do something about as some point, if that person keeps bugging me… forget twitter… too many twits tweeting about. With no context about the information I want to know about, I’m overloaded with too much noise and can no longer see the value in that system. How many good things go lost because I can’t get into the system every hour before it gets buried in so many other useless tweets?
So now if you want me and it’s really important, then you better pick up the phone and call me. And don’t bother leaving a message, just try me again at the top of the hour when I’m in-between meetings.
The application branded Twitter might go away, but I’m convinced micro messaging is here to stay. Consequently, managing the onslaught of incoming messages has become a problem unto itself.
For Twitter users, Tweetdeck emerged as the answer. I wouldn’t be surprised if email applications like Outlook add a similar feature in future releases. (Currently, Outlook lets me redirect incoming messages to different folders based on senders’ emails, but I find it cumbersome.)
I’ve fully embraced Twitter and other social networking tools, but I must admit I miss the face-to-face interaction. Nothing beats a professional or personal bond solidified in person.
Face-to-face works great. One problem betwee face-to-face and the micro message is the fact that when you are together the topic is clear. With email or twitter the topic is lost. There is just a stream of noise that now flows onto your desktop… I agree it is here to stay but I also find this statement funny. When I read this it makes me think it is new. Micro messaging is far from new. I would go as far as saying it is old. Twitter is a new platform and an old idea.
[...] addition, I found some very interesting posts on this topic by vuuch.com – A Twitter World, Fad or Here to Stay? and on some other [...]