Will IM ever replace e-mail?

[Stagger_Lee]

The key is knowing when. The people I am referring to seem to use no judgement whatsoever. Any email is important, any phonecall must be answered ( even if to say "I'm in a meeting"), any message must be read.

[tuq]

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The key is knowing when. The people I am referring to seem to use no judgement whatsoever. Any email is important, any phonecall must be answered ( even if to say "I'm in a meeting"), any message must be read.

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Yeah, people really do suck at this. It's why I despise call waiting because I think it's really rude to ever drop any call you're on to take another call, but I can see its necessity for certain emergencies or something really important. That said, I switch calls only about a handful of times per year because I think it's inconsiderate to drop the person you're talking with, but that doesn't stop plenty of people from stopping in the middle of a conversation to kick me to the curb to take another non-critical call.

As for the OP, god I hope not but I'm of a different, slightly older demographic than the Facebook/myspace crowd. I think I just miss that by 5-10 years. Also, I have less anxiety about responding to e-mails than I do IMs, but maybe that's just my impression of them. "Instant Message" is INSTANT and implies an INSTANT response. Every second that goes by is you dismissing that other person's message as not being worthy of a response! Whereas an e-mail can sit there and marinate for awhile. Maybe I'm thinking about this too hard but I think the IM thing is partly why a lot of users cloak themselves or put their profile on "permanent away" just so they aren't hounded. This is an evolving etiquette, however.

[jjshabado]

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I mainly communicate via MSN/text messages, and only use emails for internet shopping [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img] It's just a lot faster to IM/text someone than email and wait for them to reply.


[/ QUOTE ]IM being "faster" than email is just a function of how you use email.

I've now been working for 8 years for 3 different employers. At each employer, all my co-workers have Outlook (or whatever e-mail program they use) open all the time. Plus, they carry Blackberries or equivalent devices. So in those corporate environments, sending an email takes exactly the same amount of time as sending an IM.

That's why I wonder if IM will ever take over in corporate workplaces. I just don't see how it provides any advantage over email.

(In the home market, it is only faster because many people don't keep Yahoo Mail or Gmail accounts up all the time, so they only check it every few hours, as opposed to keeping an IM program up all the time while at the computer.)

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Reading every email when it comes in, is really inefficient. There have been a number of studies that have looked at the expense of context switching from what you're working on to whatever the email is about and found that you lose a lot of productivity by constantly switching what you're forcused on.

Email also isn't instantaneous, its got a 5 second to 1 minute lag for most people that makes real time conversation fairly annoying. We do software releases fairly regularly and do them at low-load times (at night, or weekends) and so also use IM to coordinate everybody. Adding in the delay of email would make these painful.

The overhead of an email vs. an IM is also higher. They're generally stored and backed up on corporate servers, so if every "you there" IM was an email you'd be significantly increasing the amount of data stored.

[tuq]

JJ, good post in general. Totally agree about storage space issues - I am a packrat and at one employer never deleted or archived anything. I got to around 22,000 e-mails and the admin said look, archive or delete, those are your choices. IIRC I bitched and they made an exception for me, I was absurdly proud of my e-mail count and was the top producer for the small-ish company so they dropped it. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

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Email also isn't instantaneous, its got a 5 second to 1 minute lag for most people that makes real time conversation fairly annoying.

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This is why, in recruiting, I get super annoyed by the e-mail only people that I work with. E-mail will never be as dynamic as a phone conversation, and is much less efficient.

Let's say I'm just getting to know someone. I need to find out why they're looking to change jobs, what type of position they're targeting, whether they're looking for contract work, full-time, or both, how flexible they are on commute, and their salary expectations. On top of this some basic information like their salary history and competence with various technologies. I could get this on a phone call in 5-10 minutes, tops, or I could volley e-mails back and forth all day.

I tend to make it clear, early, that electronic exchanges have their time and place but gathering information like that is not one of them. People typically comply but some IT nerds are weirdos and don't play along, which is usually enough of an indicator that I shouldn't be wasting my time with them anyway.

[jjshabado]

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I tend to make it clear, early, that electronic exchanges have their time and place but gathering information like that is not one of them. People typically comply but some IT nerds are weirdos and don't play along, which is usually enough of an indicator that I shouldn't be wasting my time with them anyway.

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This is basically my point as well. IM, email, phone, and even snail mail all have unique properties with different pros/cons. They're all useful when you use them appropriately but a large number of people misuse them pretty regularly.