I consume an avalanche of information every day, and I take it all for granted. You probably do too. It comes from a great number of sources, it arrives in different formats, and it has different user expectations. In other articles I’ve talked about trying to quantify signals to figure out the importance of items, but I think I really should back up and talk about the sources of information before I can really get to a useful destination.
The first source I’ll talk about is the fastest. The nearly realtime stuff. For me, this is Jabber, iChat, SMS, AIM, and IRC. Oh, and Google Chat. And Facebook. And… just kill me. That’s 7 chat systems. Now I could probably lose a few of them and not cry in my cheerios, and I almost never am logged into more than a couple of these systems at a time. This is a problem in and of itself that we could solve: a master system that automatically signs in to all 7 systems, blends them together, and just WORKS would be swell. But no chat client will ever connect to every system.