interesting article on the rise of IM popularity over email usage. it touches on the generation gap of older folks not used to spreading them across several conversations of IM, how IM is the ultimate in having communication but not really having to ‘deal’ with the person you’re IMing and the immediacy of the medium. there’s 2 really great quotes i want to highlight –

“Like parents, they try to control their children,” she says. “But companies really need to respond to the way people work and communicate.”

this from anne kirah (senior design anthropologist at microsoft). she’s talking about companies and how younger generations work differently. this is going to be a huge topic of research as time goes on and, i think, a real shake up for business. i recently had a conversation with a friend who said all their graduate folks are very different to what they were several years ago. how these kids think they can take over everything (which i think can be said about every graduating class) and they have a real sense of not needing to work for anything, everything being handed to them – a real sense of entitlement. i think that added on to the technology culture is going to shake things up a lot.

“In this world of instant gratification, e-mail has become the new snail mail,” says 25-year-old Rachel Quizon from Norwalk, California. She became addicted to instant messaging in college, where many students are logged on 24/7.

Much like home postal boxes have become receptacles for junk mail, bills and the occasional greeting card, electronic mailboxes have become cluttered with spam. That makes them a pain to weed through, and the problem is only expected to worsen as some e-mail providers allow online marketers to bypass spam filters for a fee.

i love the idea of comparing junk mail/post boxes with email. it’s such a great mental picture of how email sucks for collaboration or working with multiple people.