I came across this Tweet the other day
Twitter “seems to live somewhere between the worlds of email, instant messaging and blogging”
And it got me thinking… how are these different forms of communication defined.
If we try to define each one, then we get something like:
Instant messaging
It’s normally a private group session, it’s real-time and it’s text based.
A blog
Is publicly accessible, and is a personal journal
A Tweet
Publicly accessible, real-time and is text based. It could include a chat type session.
Email
A message over a communication network, it could be a private or group message, that is not just text. It is also not real-time.
It seems that email is such a general definition that it could encompass lots of types of messaging.
Anyway, I thought I’d try to define them in a chart.
And there you go. Please discuss.
Glad to see others interested in this. I will take the comments on-board and see what other dimensions can be used.
Thanks for the feedback.
Hi Andy,I got that tweet too (in my case from @vivianto) and I favourited it as it made me stop and think for a second or two.I really like your attempt to visualise this, but I wonder about the public / private dimension.For example, an IM or an email is only as private as the recipients choose to make it whilst tweets and blogs can be made “private” as well.When publishing anything to anyone you need to take some level of care as effectively your work can become public.Would love to hear what other dimensions you think you could explore this on?For example, I’d suggest immediacy and content type (although this is difficult due to all of the Twitter add-ons) could be a good dimensions.All the best,Brendan