(Internet) chat

2014

The more the time zone difference, the more important email and wikis become, and the less group chat is used, so the finding I got this year that email is old and chat is everything is not a match for an organization working in multiple regions. I was so dependent on chat at my last job that I had a hard time shaking it back.

I'm not saying that chat is completely useless, I'm saying that I use it for things that require real time, like taking over when work hours overlap or troubleshooting, but not much more than that.

It is often called "e-mail" in contrast to chat, but e-mail is not the only means of communication between people who do not share the same time zone, and what is important to the user is search, file version control and permalinks, not so much what the means of communication is. It doesn't really matter what the means of communication is, does it?

If the search is lousy, it's like, "How do you find past correspondence?" And without permalinks, "How are you going to show people past correspondence? Without version control, it is impossible to know which file is the latest version.

Oh, and the ability to combine email messages into a single thread, which would be very difficult to do without. It would be very difficult to go back to "what were we talking about?" It would be very difficult to go back to "what did we talk about?

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