22 June 2005

17:54

La fin de l’email:

Even my friends spam me, sending me the same e-mail messages over and over again, never stopping until they get a reply.

Bad friends, change friends, don’t you think? You’ve got to know how to teach them: my friends know full well that, if I don’t answer a message, I will later — or not at all. And they get used to it. To show you how it works: I almost haven’t got any left now.

We wouldn’t accept that from any other communication medium (imagine for a second if, out of 10 incoming phone calls, seven were dialing errors or purely commercial calls; who’d still answer their phone?).

Oh, but I thought that was exactly the way it was going in the US? And in my room, too, actually: I don’t know exactly who had my number before, but I got so tired of receiving daily mistaken calls (granted, I get very easily tired of getting calls) that I simply unplugged my phone. Which isn’t much of a bother, since I never get legitimate calls anyway (see previous paragraph).

And, as I am reading it, it becomes clear to me that instant messaging (Skype or other) is far from a simple amusing gimmick, but can really constitute a viable alternative to e-mail.

Chat would be a viable alternative if you could trust users to choose the best available system, or at least not the worst: everyone I ever talk to insists they want to chat with me on MSN, the only IM system that doesn’t allow you to send a message to an offline contact. I don’t know whether it’s because it’s included in Windows, or that the MSN client is the one that lets you play most easily with avatar pictures (and webcams), and I don’t know which of the two options is more depressing.

Not to mention, of course, that using MSN, ICQ, Yahoo or AIM implies to trust a single centralized server (well, not for MSN, though, since it doesn’t store messages). If I’ve got to choose, I’d rather trust my personal communications to the care of Wanadoo and OVH than Microsoft or AOL. Uh, well, okay, even as I write this sentence, I’m not so sure anymore.

But there remains the question of communication quality. And if you’ve ever had a chat with a MSN regular you don’t need me to get into the specifics.