Read J. LeRoy’s great post on IM, titled Infuriating Messenger 2.0 — he has some great rules about IM. We (mostly) all ascribe to reasonable telephone and email etiquette, but for IM? It is all over the map. This makes me think about a couple of things about these 3 mediums:

• Telephone/VOIP: Good spoken real-time conversation gets things done fast. Bad requires synchronization of two people’s time.
• Email: Good asynchronous. The ability to make things clear and concise. Bad well, no voice. No (reasonable) way of telling if someone has read it or if they’ll respond.
• IM: Different provides presence information.  Often faster than email. Same I think it is exactly like Email and, therefore, requires the same etiquette as email.

What I like about email? One thing I like about IM is that it speeds up the asynchronous
And Jim admits that we are first cousins. That’s his story . . . 😉