(robla updated this 2020-07-31 1:40am PDT… yes, robla really should go to bed)
Who is going to win the battle of DM’ing: Twitter, Discord, Slack, Google Talk, Facebook Messenger, Matrix/Element, Mastodon, IRC, SMS, or plain old email? I’m probably missing a few contenders.
It seems among my friends that email and SMS are still the champions. I’m going to keep editing this blog post though.
- 2020-07-29 – 3:48pm PDT – email is the unanimous favorite
- 2020-07-29 – 4:28pm PDT – it’s a tie! SMS may have pulled in front, though
- 2020-07-29 – 5:24pm PDT – what’s this; do we have a POSIX talk underdog? Is this over telnet or SSH? I sure hope it’s SSH…
- 2020-07-29 – 6:24pm PDT – Jabber/XMPP gets a vote. Jabber and XMPP make me a little sad. It seemed they had a lot going for them at one point, but XML-base protocols seemed to go out of style
- 2020-07-29 – 7pm PDT – Instagram, Zoom, Discord, Slack are all getting votes now.
- 2020-07-29 – 11:03pm PDT – the conversation is getting too much for me to keep up with
- 2020-07-29 – close to midnight – You may be wondering where all these votes are coming from. They’re coming from friends on a certain social network beginning with “F”. However, I think I want to blast this out to other social networks like Twitter, and make more updates later this week.
- 2020-07-30 – (robla did other things)
- 2020-07-31 – 1:44am PDT – many other conversations got more interesting than this one on one of my other social networks. Twitter has been kinda dead., but someone noticed. I forgot to post it on Mastodon, but that’s fixed. Still, the F-word website is still very much the king/queen/czar of “social media”. Some ideas I’ve “heard”: SMS, Teams chat, Talkabout, Blackberry Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, Line, Kakao Talk. It all seems to be dependent on context. Sometimes it’s about co-workers. Sometimes it’s about co-gamers. Sometimes it’s about using mobile phones. It’s all still pretty interesting to me…
Footnotes
- [1] The Wikipedia article I lifted the image from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat. The image is hosted on Wikimedia Commons, and was taken by Urpo Lankinen (User:Wwwwolf). / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5). It depicts the first IRC server, and might have been taken as late as 2001. Since it’s the first, the machine must be from 1988 or earlier, but the IRC used to be pretty cool. (see footnote [3] below).
- [2] Image by Raja SANDHU for XMPP Standards Foundation.Edited by Ludovic BOCQUET: A first time in September 2017 and a second time in September 2019. – https://xmpp.org/, MIT, Link
- [3] IRC logs: Transcript from IRC on ibiblio.org, linked to from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_August_Coup . It shows an IRC transcript in August 1991 when people inside the Soviet Union were chatting with people outside the Soviet Union. Michael Gorbachev wasn’t on IRC from his vacation home, but maybe he should have been.
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