Buzz and Wave and e-mail, oh my!
How do we communicate when? There are no hard and fast rules, but these are the guidelines in the back of my mind:
Blogs are a great medium to go on at length about a given topic (whether it’s yourself or an arcane area of expertise) without targeting specific people and without expecting a reply. I suspect that with the rising popularity of social networking sites, there is less of a tendency than before for blogs to contain the minutiæ of everyday life.
E-mail is great for conveying any amount of information deliberately and reflectively, without a great sense of urgency. You can craft your message carefully, including all relevant points and making any needed arguments. I use this when I have a lot to say and I can wait for the reply.
Wave is ideal for collaborating on documents. Unlike e-mail, where replies are sequential, with wave you can comment inline and even edit the original post. I think this is great for giving feedback or co-authoring, but it has not yet taken off as a replacement for e-mail in my social and work circles.
Chat (instant messaging) is for those times when you need to interact with someone right now for something time-sensitive (which may be as important as “tell me how to restart the servers” or as trivial as “watcha doin’?”). Chat, by its nature, demands more attention than e-mail, but it is less intrusive than telephoning: your respondents can still ignore you, deal with other things simultaneously, and have their hands comfortably free to keep typing.
Chat status starts getting into social networking. You can advertise information that is not targeted towards a single recipient and for which you do not expect a response. I use it as an FYI to display what I’m doing or feeling or to point out something generally interesting.
Facebook allows you to keep “lightly in touch” with a large number of people. You make available your status or any other information you wish, and do not necessarily expect a reply. Likewise, you can see what other people have published and respond if you like. I use it to get a flavor for what’s going on in my “friends’” lives, and to let them know about mine. Interestingly, the meaning of “friend” has become diluted by this medium, as people that you may superfically know, or know not at all in real life, ask to join your network. You’re still somewhat curious about them (and I think it’s good, on both pragmatic and idealistic grounds, to interact with a broader range of people), and so they become your quote-friends.
LinkedIn is like Facebook, but geared more towards explicitly building a network of professional contacts. As with Facebook, I find pressure to dilute the meaning of a professional contact to someone I know only socially, but since this is a secondary social networking site for me, I have been able to keep my network pure.
Google Buzz, just released this week, is a new social networking medium whose biggest selling points, in my mind, are that it integrates with other Google services like Mail and Maps, and can more easily syndicate content from some other sources like Google Reader and Talk. I use it as I use my chat status, to give a general status message, but also to publish interesting or valuable information and see what replies I get. Buzz also lets you control who sees each Buzz, which is handy at times. At work, it is proving a good forum to non-invasively solicit cooperation and feedback from others.
Of course, the boundaries among these use cases are porous: Facebook has email, you can have your IMs waiting in people’s inboxes, and you can have a conversation with someone using blog comments. Still, I like to have clarity as to what tool I should be using, so I don’t have to think about it every single time.
