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It's time to cook something! How about an omelette? You need to scramble the eggs first-- thankfully, there's a tunnel between your fridge and the scrambler. You press the button, and 4 eggs roll into the bowl.

While that scrambles, it's time to chop vegetables. You'd like to do onions, but the tube from the fridge to the chopper only fits carrots and asparagus. Not great for an omelette, but good enough.

Time to cook. Unfortunately, your chopper is out of date, and it doesn't work with your pan model. The scrambler, well, it's actually a mixer and was only meant for cakes, so it goes directly into the oven.

So you put special bowls in the fridge, suck the scrambled eggs and vegetables back through the tubes, take the bowl out, store it on dropbox, and give your pan a link.

God, this sucks.

I'm not sure how this really addresses anything in the parent post. Sure, interoperability sucks, but surely you're not suggesting that the solution is to glom everything together into a single monolithic app that does everything?

By all means, fix the fact that tools are painful when you want them to work together. Maybe unify a few of those communications tools.

> Let me communicate with a unified UI and unified contacts.

This was from the top comment. It is suggesting the solution is to glom everything together. I think the comment you are responding to is concurring with their parent comment by providing an illustration of the concerns raised.

I think a better example is how WebOS and Windows Phone handle communication. They treat communication like it's between two people, rather than between two applications. Text messages and Facebook messages are combined into one, so you can continue the conversation from anywhere. Facebook and Twitter posts are added together to show what the person is doing, rather than what accounts on disparate are doing. These aren't huge monolithic apps, they're more like feeds from services all tied to a single person. Both WebOS and Windows Phone allow you to combine multiple accounts for contacts together into one person.

Basically, it shouldn't matter what service someone is using. What really matters to people is people. If someone is at their computer, they might want to use Facebook messenger. If they're away, they'll want to use text. Barring that, they might rather use email. The point is, someone shouldn't have to open the Facebook app, find they're not online, send a text only to wait for a response and assume they do or do not have their phone on them, then send an email. If they can do it with one app, the app telling them the best way to contact someone, it makes communication much easier.

No one has gotten it right yet, but I feel WebOS and Windows Phone are closer than the traditional discrete applications.

No, there just needs to be interoperation layers like file systems, sockets, stdio, etc. In the kitchen metaphor, it's your hands.

<snark>

Like a lot of snark, it's not really that bright, but it's agressive and presenting itself as clever. Not all of those things deal with the same category of work.

> You might want to send a message to somebody and not care how, but I do care how.

But why do people have to remember how? Why can't I send off a message and have a computer figure out the preferred way to send the message. Remember, a big stakeholder in this preference is often the recipient. Also, most people don't really care about the how. They care about the result.

> If something major in my life happened..., I wouldn't call my best friends to tell them, I would SMS them.

You mean you would use the most appropriate form of communication, with the right degree of formality and immediacy. Right now that means picking from a slew of applications. The history of technology tells us that those applications will probably change, and that eventually people will be somewhat removed from the how, only expecting things to just work. (And that people who realize this can parlay that into tons of money.)

EDIT: Someday our insistence on picking an app to do communications will seem like driver's insistence on manually shifting gears.

If I send 50 SMS to someone who is charged 10c per message, I have cost them $5.00. So I should care whether I send them an SMS vs. an email.

Someone without a data plan doesn't have constant access to email. Maybe they only check it on a computer every few days. So if I want to send an instant message, SMS might be necessary.

Randomly sending an email vs. an SMS does not "just work". Nor does forcing each person to communicate to a computer some elaborate policy for how to reach them best.

> If I send 50 SMS to someone who is charged 10c per message, I have cost them $5.00. So I should care whether I send them an SMS vs. an email.

Yes. You're supporting my point.

> Someone without a data plan doesn't have constant access to email. Maybe they only check it on a computer every few days. So if I want to send an instant message, SMS might be necessary. > Randomly sending an email vs. an SMS does not "just work".

Again, yes, this is it exactly. Things right now are very far from it "just works." Things are horrendously complex, and it often sucks for one reason or another. Some people can manage all of this complexity in their heads, but that's certainly not true of everybody. What's needed is an integrated vertical.

> Nor does forcing each person to communicate to a computer some elaborate policy for how to reach them best.

True, that, though being able to set that just once might be better for some of the tech savvy than having to keep track of it all. That wouldn't fit everyone, though. What if someone could communicate their preferences to something like Siri after the fact, with a machine learning system adjusting preferences taking into account all of the communication stakeholders?

Paying to receive an SMS makes absolutely no sense.

Here in the UK, we pay to send them, not to receive them.

It's counted as one message each for the sender and receiver in the US. We are then billed simply by that number.

Conspiracy theories are bunk. That fact that US citizens stand for SMS double billing is the best proof that we're sheeple.

>the best proof that we're powerless.

More accurate. People need to communicate, and SMS is a good way to do that. Would we like it to be cheaper? Of course. There have been numerous lawsuit attempts, petitions, and boycotts. Doesn't matter. There's nothing we can do to change it. If everyone just stopped using it, they'd bundle it in with a package you had no choice but to buy. If you just abstained from a cell phone, you'd be in more trouble than you'd have been 20 years ago since payphones and emergency phones no longer exist.

It's not that people pay it and shut up about it, it's that people pay it because there's no other real option.

While I see a phone call as fundamentally different from an email, I don't see SMS as different. In fact, I see it as a really lame competing implementation of the same basic idea that deserves to die as soon as possible.

Funny, I see SMS as an improvement. Enforced brevity is an improvement IMO.

tl;dr will be the death of intelligent discourse.

There are lots of things I want to do with email that I can't do with SMS. Maybe half the emails I send could get across most of what they need to in 160 characters. Other recent messages included detailed tech support/troubleshooting, a list of equipment and design discussion with a partner about an application we're developing.

None of those would fit in 160 characters. There isn't even a way to losslessly compress them in to 160 characters. I can always write a short message when I only have a little bit to say though.

I also dislike twitter and like RSS. I'm evidently not in the majority.

The only functionality that SMS provides and email doesn't (in most countries) is network notification, which can be easily fixed. It would be relatively easy to replace SMS with email without users noticing the difference.

> If it's late, I might send my friend an email instead of an SMS because I know that the SMS will probably wake her up, and the email won't.

> Being able to control this is a good thing.

those are great points, and a solution that can really replace the 18 methods we have of sending messages today would take that into account. Email today has this lame "importance" flag nobody uses but certainly, if we could get over the familiarity hump, having a unified kind of message where we can configure how it travels and how it alerts the receiver (not to mention, that the receiver would be able to route these various classes of messages in any way he/she sees fit) is not a huge technical issue.

Software apps and physical appliances are very different, so your analogy is ridiculous.

When I email someone, software automatically routes it to the destination so I don't have to. Why should this not be abstracted across channels.

As for my trying to dictate how the recipient consumes incoming messages -- surely its more intelligent for each person to decide how they want to consume messages. I know some people who live in their SMS but ignore phone calls. Indeed the whole hierarchy of SMS / email / IM / phone / conference is very much in flux. Most people are probably more interested in who the sender is, not how they're sending.

But by your logic maybe I should use one app per person I talk to.

When I email someone, software automatically routes it to the destination so I don't have to. Why should this not be abstracted across channels.

There seems to be a whole world or metadata involving communications preferences which we've just barely started to scratch.

Or you could mark the message as 'important' before sending it.

Alternatively, you could still choose email vs sms with a single toggle instead of having to use two very different apps for what is essentially the same thing.

I agree that having different forms of communication is useful. Phone/SMS is more personal, partly because I only give my number to those I want to contact me. I use my email for personal communication as well but I also use it to sign up for things like coupons from stores, etc. Some seem to be arguing that having so many options is difficult for the user, but I really don't know anyone who has trouble keeping them straight.

Sounds like your snarky self needs a matter replicator. I think the schematics are available in some book about Star Trek somewhere but you'll probably need to find a dilithium crystal to make it work.

Friend, what you need is a Thermomix... and $2k or whatever they cost! (http://www.thermomix.com.au for anyone who doesn't know what they are.)

> If it's late, I might send my friend an email instead of an SMS because I know that the SMS will probably wake her up, and the email won't.

That should be up to the other end to determine. I should not need to say `SMS wakes me up, email doesn't' when they are fundamentally the same thing. That's an implementation detail.

The right way to do this is for the other person to be able to tell the phone what they want, regardless of protocol: messages from my Nagios system at work, or family members, should awaken me. Anything else should be ignored until morning.

Sometimes I do want my friends to wake me up in the middle of the night:

"I'm drunk, I need a ride home."

"Can I stay at your house."

"$emergency"

"Hey, I really just need somebody to talk to..."

etc. etc.

I don't want to have to go through my entire contact list, individually setting people who can and can't wake me up at night. There is already a mechanism for this, it's called "human interaction". My friends know who can and can't wake me up; they know this because they're my friends.

By giving them my phone number, I'm trusting them to respect that, and only wake me up if they need to.

I've been wishing there was a layer between my phone and me that said, effectively, "You've reached David's phone - if this is an emergency or he's expecting your call, press 1; otherwise, press 2 to set up an appointment for a later call, or 3 leave a voicemail message." Where 2 would talk to my calendar and ideally their calendar and figure out a time that works for both of us without my involvement. Sure, people could just mash 1, but people always have an option to be rude when there's interpersonal interaction going on, and at least this way they have a way not to be rude while still reaching out to me by phone, and a way to actually get through to me in an emergency.

with gvoice, people can leave a voicemail that gets transcripted (vaguely) and texted to me. I glance at the text and decide if I want to call them back or not.

I love that capability, but it's not quite everything I want - I do want a way for people to loudly interrupt me in the case of a genuine emergency, but I want them to have to reaffirm that most of the time. The hands-off scheduling would be nice, too. But for what it is, it's rad, to be sure.

Mr. Number (for Android) comes somewhat close. You at least have the option of determining who can get through to you.

I'd prefer something more configurable as well -- priority list of who can reach me at any time, during daylight hours, when I'm generally open to talking, and never.

As well as a way for those with at least some level of trust (and, say, emergency services) to reach out to me directly.

Combination of Mr. Number and a pretty acerbic voicemail message ("Hi, you've reached me, don't leave a message, email me instead, if you're a good friend, feel free to text") low-techs this solution for me.

It's much easier and humane to accomplish this with multiple applets with different characteristics.

There are a lot of implicit social expectations built into different messaging systems.

I have friends who I regularly email, SMS, and IM with. We've never explicitly discussed this, but it's pretty much assumed that sending an SMS means you want a response ASAP, an IM expects a response within a few hours, and an email can wait a day or two. Even though all three are ostensibly messaging systems, there is a social understanding that different messaging mediums have different purposes; simply filtering based on sender doesn't convey enough contextual information to make a meaningful decision.