The Future Of Chat

David Strom has an interesting article about how chat is evolving to replace e-mail, conference calls, and meetings.. In particular, group chat is evolving in that direction -- people working on similar projects leave chatroom windows all day, and stop in when they have something to discussion. It's happening on Wall Street, in tech companies, and even on Naval fleets on maneuvers. David also talks about technology for setting up chat servers.

This is one of the ways computer users have found to deal with spam. E-mail just isn't the critical communications channel that it used to be. We've offloaded a lot of what we used to do in e-mail onto other application, including chat. RSS is replacing bulk newsletters for a small but devoted group.

You may not think you use RSS, but if you regularly visit pages like Yahoo News you do, especially if you use a customized home page like those offered by Yahoo, Google or specialized custom home pages like Protopage

Here at InformationWeek we're still big on e-mail, though many of us do use chat quite a bit.