On Fri, 2013-10-11 at 12:28 +0100, Allan Day wrote:
IRC: * You tend to join channels, not conversations. * Individuals tend to be on a high number of channels simultaneously. * Channels often have a high number of people in them. * Your interest in a channel tends remain the same over time. * Most people tend to read and not write. * Participants are often strangers. IM * Conversation based rather than channel based. * You know the people you talk to. * The number of conversations you are involved in at any one time tends to be fairly low. * Conversations tend to be temporally specific. * The number of participants in a conversation tends to be low. * All the participants in a conversation usually speak. The distinction seems pretty clear to me.
It is *broadly* true that IRC tends to match the description you give for it above, I grant you. Although not 100% so, and for other protocols like XMPP it's even less clear that they can fit cleanly into one camp or the other. For example some people use XMPP purely in the 'IM' mode that you describe, and others use it purely in the 'IRC' mode (actually in xchat via Bitlbee, in my case). But let's not focus on the accuracy or validity of the generalisation. You list about six criteria above, as the differences between the communication modes. Is a user expected to consider all six of those criteria and work out which mode of operation they're using today, and open the *correct* tool? Or to know "oh, I use XMPP for IRC-mode communication but *most* people use it for IM-mode communication so actually I have to open the IM tool instead". What, *exactly*, does the user's decision-making process look like, when she wants to communicate and has to choose which tool to use for it? -- dwmw2
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