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As a "messaging centre where we coordinate our electronically mediated communication" a smartphone would be infinitely more useful if there was one app for all that communication. Keeping track of which people you communicate over which app, which conversations happened where, not to mention with huge interface and functionality differences (e.g. you can search e-mail for old conversations, you can barely do some rudimentary searches on Facebook Messenger (at least through the desktop web interface), but I don't believe you can do that at all on e.g. Instagram or Snapchat) and close to zero interoperability - this all creates a big and unnecessary cognitive load, and is very suboptimal.

Call me spoiled, but I think modern OSes - not just mobile, but desktop too - force way too little in terms of UX. That's why on my computers I like to route everything text-related through Emacs. That joke about it being an "operating system" is actually a compliment. It gives you a very big set of operations that are consistent for all tasks that involve any kind of text.

But barring Emacs-OS for mobile phones, I'd settle for a decent dashboard that could efficiently summarize all messaging channels in one place, and allow easy interop between them.

One could make a reasonable argument that the smartphone is the "one app" of which you speak.

It, or rather its OS, should be. But just like desktop OSes, I feel it doesn't enforce enough interoperability beteween applications and uniformity of UX.

Exactly.

And the phone number and/or the IMEI is the technological identifier that ties all our identities together.

Multi-SIM phones.

Non-SIM (Wifi-only) phones.

Multiple phone-users.

There is no universal identifier. I may absolutely insist there isn't. And I strongly suspect phone tech (number-based dialing) is on its way out. For all the reasons Mossberg states, the one app I hate most is the phone, and I don't have one. Haven't for years. There are phones by which I can occasionally be reached. There's a mobile phone which occasionally has service. Both are highly deprecated.

I'm not sure I understand your point. You are referring to rare edge cases that don't invalidate the general point.

They aren't rare edge cases.

Assumptions about identity tend to fail. Perversely. Badly.

Yes, absolute assumptions about identity fail badly, as you correctly point out. My point is different: for most people the combo of phone number/IMEI and the phone as physical token is the de-facto electronically addressable social identity. All major social networks are based on this empirically observable fact.

Those for whom phone/phone number/IMEI is not enough might encounter problems with the current state of social networking.

> Those for whom phone/phone number/IMEI is not enough might encounter problems with the current state of social networking.

They do, and they cope. It's not that it is mathematically impossible to share a smartphone.

Think of poorer families that have one mobile per household. Think of I-dont-know-what-kind-of-thinking-leads-to-that families that use a shared e-mail (or even Facebook) account. Hell, think of my younger sister who for some time borrowed smartphone from my mom, because she didn't have one but wanted to check Facebook / Instagram / whatever regularly.

One device per person & one account per person is not universal when you start looking outside of tech-inclined people and their immediate families. Sure this assumption probably holds for most people, but I'd wager that the "most" here means something like 60-80%, and not 99.999%.

Nothing in social will ever be 99.999%, so what?

60-80% is enough for the network effect to overcome everything else, and for the phone/IMEI to become the de-facto standard. Just like TCP/IP/Ethernet/Wifi became the networking de-facto standard despite other networking protocols existing (and being superior in some dimensions like ATM). The remaining 20-40% will adapt. Some of them will not have their needs met. The world moves on.

The interesting question is: what does the new fungibility of social software mean for the lock-in-based business model of the likes of Twitter/Facebook etc? How will they regain lock-in? Will they be able to add non-fungible features, like e.g. WeChat, or will they whither?

That shared account one. Yep.

Now make it two people, one account, multiple buugy IMAP 4 server interactions, and a compulsive tendency to delete old email "so it doesn't slow down the computer".

Plus, of course, an absolute inability to tell something to just one of them.

Multiple other confounding issues.

It's not an app.

It's a terminal to a bunch of different application services, none of which talks to each other well.

In the Emacs (or unified use case), I could snarf in content (as text / JSON / whatevs) from one messaging queue / stack / channel and post it out to another or others. On mobile, options for copying and pasting text alone are horribly crippled, to say nothing of the fucking pathetic editors.

E.g., G+ does not support highlighting and copying selected text or URLs from its Android app. Yes, you can copy an entire message. Then, say, past that to the six line editor window HN offers me.

I've got emacs and vim on this system (Termux offers both, also a freestanding Vim client). But I cannot copy to/from the system clipboard from these. Instead, I save to the App-specific directory of another editor, open the file there, copy text, and paste it.

Yeah, I've done that. Yeah, it fucking sucks.

At least on desktop I can install, say, "It's All Text" as a browser extention and pop up any textarea-editable content into a preferred Real Fucking Editor and muck with it.

(Infinite Internet Pointz to anyone who can suggest a way of invoking Vim with a specific set of arguments, say: ":set tw=0 linebreak wrap syn ft=markdown" just as an arbitrary example.)

I used to think the same, and in the past it was possible (more or less) to use just one messenger for everything, but I've changed my mind on this.

- Siloing helps to separate communities. In particular, it reduces the probability of accidentally sharing content with the wrong crowd. I'm happy that people can't even see who's in my contact list. On twitter people use automated blacklists to block people based on whom they follow etc.

- One size does not fit all. Insta is ideal for sharing photos, but not good for sharing code. BitBucket / Github on the other hand ...

Agreeing with CPLX, I'd say the UX of modern phones makes is really easy to switch between apps, to route content between apps if required (rarely in my experience) and has enough similarity (e.g. shared keyboard, same cut/copy/paste mechanism) so that using all of them is pretty seamless and requires little in the way 're-wiring' one's muscle memory when changing apps.

I'm also an emacs user, but there is too much visual stuff going on in my communication these days that I can no longer route it through emacs. Moreover, I do most of my communication through the phone these days.

Hellz yes on a dashboard for unified messaging! But instead of leveraging phone numbers[1], etc., everyone would just get their own space on the web - maybe like a domain. Then all services -whether social networks or email or text whatever - could be funneled through that space/domain. Then there would be a single messaging platform app/server running on this space/domain...and it would act both as a shield but also a filter and much more!

[1] Using a space/domain on the web avoids the changing phone numbers dilemma, etc.

Possibly not phones, but a tablet-with-keyboard: Termux will give you access to an apt repo which includes emacs.

I've yet to incorporate that as my central interface, but I am oh so fucking goddamn tempted.

(The biggest problem: early in my nerddom I learned emacs, after having learned vi ... then took a gig where the boss didn't believe in adding anything to the Unix server that wasn't put there by God Himself (a/k/a the vendor). So no emacs. Lost all my finger memory. It's been too painful to recover it since. I really should just lock myself up in a room and get on with it, no?)

> Possibly not phones, but a tablet-with-keyboard: Termux will give you access to an apt repo which includes emacs.

Yeah, I've been thinking about the same thing recently. Especially given that I keep my life organized via org-mode + DropBox combo and I'd love to be able to invoke full agenda view without access to PC...

That said, because I often end up doing things like Arduino workshops, which require hooking up USB devices with specific drivers to them, it's pushing me towards a new laptop. TBH, the new Surface tablets from Microsoft looks like an excellent choice for my use case, but they're sadly expensive as hell (not unreachable for me, just not worth the marginal utility I expect to gain from the new device).

> I really should just lock myself up in a room and get on with it, no?

Yeah :). Or maybe, just use the fact that you've learned the vi keybindings and switch to Evil mode (or even Spacemacs). That's what I'm trying to do now, but with almost zero prior exposure to vi bindings. I've become convinced that vi has much better approach to keys than Emacs, with that whole command language thing.

A centralised messaging tool provides a centralised messaging policy. You can enforce filters, access rules, quiet times, etc., among these.

A centralised messaging tool provides a centralised messaging archive. If you want to find something, you can search one place, one time, with consistent syntax. You don't have to scramble through a half-dozen or more services to find crap.

A centralised messaging tool offers a standard interface. Even if it's dealing with systems which have their own capabilities, your editors, shortcuts, contacts, etc., are in one place.

A centralised messaging tool offers you central control over your contact lists. Fuck any app that wants my contacts list. Just completely, totally, 100% fuck it. For starters, that's not my information to give. You can pile on any number of privacy-and-security based arguments on top of that.

In the IM days, there was a set of autonomous systems that evolved: ICQ, YIM, AIM, MSM, Jabber, etc., etc., etc. And eventually, single unified clients which could speak all of them. Or turn all of them the fuck off in one go.

We're moving backward.

>I don't understand the handwringing over too many messaging systems and their notifications.

Your point isn't unreasonable, it's just that may of these services doesn't have the same filtering capabilities that something like has.

Snapchat and Instagram, yeah that pretty safe to ignore, but many simply can't. They're "flashing" to get your attention, the systems are designed that way. Sure, maybe people should "just have more willpower", most of us don't though.

I noticed that you left out things like Facebook and Twitter, where it's hard to know if it going to be important, before you check.

Personally, my rules for communicating:

Email - It might be important, but not time critical in any way. My preferred form of communicating in general.

SMS - I might get back to you, I may not. SMS is for "just letting you know" sort of things.

Phone call - It's important, or you need feedback/have questions. I'm not going to waste time texting or emailing back and forth if it can be resolved by a 2 minute phone call.

Everything else is: Don't expect me to react to this.

I still feel that with all newer forms of communicating it's pretty hard to beat either a phone call or email.

   it's pretty hard to beat 
   either a phone call or email.

I like email too, but it's difficult to reach young people this way. They may not even have email addresses. In my world, phonecalls now have primarily two purposes: emergencies (XYZ had an accident, come to hospital immediately) and communicating with the very old, so I rarely use it anymore.

   Everything else is:

That would not fly in my milieu. Many things are organised via Whatsapp/LINE etc. I'd become an outcaste if I ignored this.

>That would not fly in my milieu.

That's really the key. I might prefer email, but I'm the only one in my group of friends and family that works that way. SMS is the preferred choice for my family and Facebook for anyone else. In most cases you just need to accept that the people you need to communicate with may have other preferences.

I would be surprised to find that someone didn't have an email address though. Don't you still need that for signing up for most services? Whether someone check their email or not is a different story of cause.

> I like email too, but it's difficult to reach young people this way.

I gifted my 13yo niece a year of Spotify recently and, to create her account, they required an email address.

She looks at me half-confused. "I can just use my usual, right?"

"Sure," I say, a bit confused by the question and watching to see what that means.

Turns out in her peer group they all use 10 minute expiring emails from various free net services. Gmail is something they just hold onto for notifications from school and older relatives.

The problem is that sometimes you don't pick messaging apps you use, your friends/relatives/coworkers do. So to communicate with them you have to use what they use. For example, I don't like Skype, but it's used by some people I want to have connection with and they have no plans to switch/use something else.

Exactly.

For me the pattern is: I subscribe to any new social / communication service and see what happens. Probably because I work in IT, I'm an early adopter, and when I first subscribe to a service, I have nobody to talk to, and I let the app 'simmer'. With most services this never changes, but occasionally one of them makes it big, and all of a sudden 'everybody' in some group that I participate in uses the service.

My social world mostly self-selects into neat silos, e.g. Europeans rarely use LINE, older people rarely use Snap, and I amplify this tendency by judicious choice of whom I communicate with over which channel, e.g. work contacts don't get on my Snap. I learned from the Facebook disaster.

The smooth interface of a modern smartphone makes switching between different apps near seamless, so I really don't care which one I use. They are all good enough for me. Each app is completely fungible, and if one of them disappears, we switch to another one. So the network effect is still there, in that an app is as useful as it has members, but there is no longer a strong lock-in.

I'm quite happy with how this has turned out.