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Comment by ctkrohn | Hacker News Reader

There's a hierarchy of immediacy for communication methods:

* Cell Phone: Make me drop everything and talk to you

* Desk Phone: If I'm free, I'll talk to you

* IM, SMS: Maybe I'm jammed and I can't reply right this second, but I'll take a look and get back ASAP. For what it's worth, Bloomberg messaging falls into this category.

* Email: Give me a couple hours and I'll write a thoughtful response

* Physical letters: Probably something important that you need to keep a hardcopy of. Expect a response in a couple days.

Email has a very nice niche that's as much a consequence of social convention as it is of the protocol. If email became realtime and people expected responses within 30 seconds or even 5 minutes, it would lose much of its value.

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While I generally agree, in my experience extremely few cell phone calls require the immediacy implied by them.

I'd love a screening system: "press 1 to make my phone ring", otherwise straight to voicemail where I'll also get informed via Voice -> Email if I don't check it sooner.

There is a good bit in Tim Ferriss's "4 Hour Work Week" where his voicemail tells people to email him, and he will only check his email once per day, in the morning, IIRC.

Yeah, Google Voice should add that feature. Or you could build it pretty easily with Twilio.

Google Voice does come with call screening: http://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html

Which I've used, but it's a PITA rather than any real aid, especially w/o an Android phone. It also slows down and mildly annoys anyone who is calling you (maybe not a bad thing, but certainly not the same thing). And it's only really useful for people not in your contacts list, which is probably significantly less than 1/2 if you're not using it for work.

Plus, anyone not annoyed enough will still make your phone ring every time they call, demanding attention now to at least see who called. But I could do that before, with caller ID.

You could build a small app to do this with twillio. Patrick did:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/12/29/twilio-phone-call-web-ap...

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/15/deploying-sinatra-on-ubu...

Excellent comment and great point.

Email was, is and will be popular in days to come just because it's not realtime. We have many other forms of realtime communication (both verbal and written), and yet, email managed to survive throughout all these years.

Not to mention the part where it's not designed for realtime. If you want realtime, just use IMs.

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