There was a great post on Fixzr.com yesterday on the current confusion regarding how to respond to different personal communication channels. John Connolly notes how we always used to understand how to respond to a given channel. You’d get back to a voicemail quickly, a personal email could take a few days, and SMS required an immediate response etc. etc. Now, it feels like the rule book has been thrown out the window.

Previously we had multiple channels where the prioritisation was inherent in the channel. Now we have a proliferation of channels where the prioritisation is far from clear. My issue is less with the lack of prioritisation and more with the proliferation. The channels I currently have are:

• Mobile Phone (+ voicemail)
• Text - which feels more like email on an iPhone
• Skype calls
• Skype instant messenger
• Work Email
• Personal Emails (all account aggregated into one inbox … stuffed with Spam)
• Twitter (public)
• Twitter (private)
• Gchat
• Facebook (messages)
• Facebook (comments and wall)
• Linked
• In A Small World
• Entrepreneur Network
• Blog comments
• + RSS Feeds from blogs I follow

Some of these are aggregated by my email client but very imperfectly. And some services try to go further such as SpinVox which tries to amalgamate voicemail and email/text. Yet, even on my iphone I check 6 channels  regularly (SMS, Voicemail, Two email accounts, Twitter and Facebook). I would love to see a world where these came into one portal (most likely an app) which amalgamated the messages and then sorted them by channel and by priority (which may have to be stated by the sender?).

Given the general trend of opening services up so that others services can innovate on them, let’s hope this will soon be possible.