It feels like a regression. I don't really enjoy conversations with these tools. It's not as fun to converse with someone over the course of days when each message is some hours after the last. It is also not clear when people might want to talk. Synchronous IM was better because it was clear when people were available to talk, and when they were they would be attentive enough to have a real-time, fulfilling conversation. I haven't experienced that since MSN died.
Now everyone is always available on their phone, but also not truly available at any time. Presence indicators don't mean much any more because people may be online just to view Facebook, or on their phone only momentarily.
I think another contributing factor to the decline in quality of IM conversations is the use of phone keyboards. They are so much worse to type on than a real keyboard that I believe it changes the nature and quality of conversations people have considerably, for the worse.
They can answer whenever they like, but when I choose to read their reply I will have lost some of my train of thought or maybe lost interest in the topic. It doesn't allow for the same quality, or at least type, of discourse in my experience.
>IM is not a good medium
It certainly was a good medium - I had lots of great conversations on old IM services and so did countless others. See this related thread from the other day [1]
You could talk to many people at the same time, unlike a phone call. You could more easily do it at the same time as your homework, watching a film, or doing something else on the internet.
You have to reinvent whole new protocols for those async conversations in the process, though, or misunderstandings or even outright failings in trust can ensue (as this article points out in a couple of examples.)
Any time you completely change a fundamental understanding of how something is done - especially something as critically foundational as communication - you end up having to build new rules quickly, or risk destroying either that foundation or trust in the new protocol.
> I think another contributing factor to the decline in quality of IM conversations is the use of phone keyboards. They are so much worse to type on than a real keyboard that I believe it changes the nature and quality of conversations people have considerably, for the worse.
I am not so sure about that. I remember conversation from my 3310 and it was way shorter blip of words. I love word drawing, it speeds up my writing by a 5x factor (or 3x or 10x, don't know).
The thing is you never really know if the other party is up for long sentences because you can't tell if he's behind a computer keyboard or a phone (or god forbids, a tablet). It usually means "I am on the phone, talk to you later")
Yes, I think smartphone keyboards are obviously much better than a dumbphone, but worse than a PC keyboard. The problem is that now smartphone keyboards are used so much more frequently, in so many more situations. You can often tell when someone is typing from a phone in a IM message, an email, or a Hacker News comment.
> Yes, I think smartphone keyboards are obviously much better than a dumbphone
Really? I could imagine some (or maybe even most) people are faster on a smartphone, but for me it's "obviously" worse.
I'm tremendously slower on iOS/Android on-screen keyboards than I was with T9. I could text really fast using T9 on a hard keypad without even looking down at the screen, despite only really using it heavily for a year or two. Then I got a Blackberry Curve, a kind-of-but-not-really-smartphone with a full hard QWERTY keyboard -- there I was similarly fast.
Then came the iPhone and screen-only Android phones and I got much slower and less precise, and touch-typing is a total crapshoot. Despite having used them for almost 10 years now, I don't think I've ever recovered to anywhere near the speed I had with even a T9 keypad.
I think the key difference is a hard keyboard (or even 10 digit keypad). I'm not saying smartphones aren't enough of an improvement in other ways (obviously, since I've chosen them over dumbphones for a decade), but I really miss the haptic feedback of actual keys.
I wouldn't even say smartphone keyboards are strictly better than those of feature phones. Ones based on physical keyboards expecting fingers on the homerow aren't suited for one-handed use. Meanwhile dumbphones get tactile feedback on top of T9 (introduced to me in highschool by a girl who was upset by my "slow" replies prior).
It seems the parent has luck with word drawing, but I remember looking into alternative keyboards a couple years ago and not being impressed. The most enjoyable and fastest writing I've done on a mobile device is with 10-key Japanese input[0]. Unfortunately I do not regularly talk to anyone in Japanese.
[0]: Couldn't find a good article or webpage on this. You can hopefully grasp the core concept from http://miku.sega.jp/flick/en/. Since Japanese phonetics all end in -a, -e, -i, -o, -u with the exception of ん ~ n, the flick directions are symmetric. Coupled with how more than decent Japanese IME is and a few extra keys to navigate the suggestions, modifiers and other common input (brackets, commas, etc. operated by the same flick motions) you can get very fast and precise. I don't get to use it often, but it's a joy when I do. They even made a game out of it :)
> I think another contributing factor to the decline in quality of IM conversations is the use of phone keyboards. They are so much worse to type on than a real keyboard
If I am at a place by myself then I just talk, using speech to text. Speech recognition is pretty good these days, I usually only have to fix small things in the resulting text (names, etc.), and it's much faster than typing a longer message.
Now everyone is always available on their phone, but also not truly available at any time. Presence indicators don't mean much any more because people may be online just to view Facebook, or on their phone only momentarily.
I think another contributing factor to the decline in quality of IM conversations is the use of phone keyboards. They are so much worse to type on than a real keyboard that I believe it changes the nature and quality of conversations people have considerably, for the worse.