I’ve been reading a lot about the imminent age of smart messaging and virtual assistants. Some great reads, offering a variety of perspectives (from business through to design and more) include “2016 will be the year of conversational commerce,” “Clippy’s revenge — smart messaging as platform shift,” “No-UI is the new UI,” and “A Question of Agency.”

I have to admit that I’m very curious about how this ‘new’ way of interacting with each other and with machines will develop. In recent conversations with various friends, developers and entrepreneurs, I’ve started putting together a view on how messaging fits into the broader set of motifs that appear in online communication.

I’ve narrowed it down to 4 groups, with the last being a placeholder for uncategorised services. Each of them allows — or prevents — us from conversing in different ways, and is headed in slightly different directions.

This is what I have learned so far.

Group #1. Messaging: Gaining popularity

A recurring theme of messaging is that it is the ‘natural’ way that we talk to each other. This is probably very specific to your age. If you are part of the generation that grew up with SMS, IM clients (Hotmail, AOL, etc.), and chat forums, then yes: you’ve been trained in the ways of the text. Writing short sentences this way is easy and can even be more polite. If you’re old enough, you will remember the days of the magical T9 keyboard; the days before you knew that an SMS had been read, and before replies were visually structured into conversations.

This medium is regaining popularity due to services like WhatsApp and Slack. They are services that facilitate chatting, and their simplicity is what makes them great. They don’t have to have fancy user interfaces. They are relatively history-less: the things you post do not become part of your ‘profile.’ You converse 1-to-1 or in small(ish) groups of contacts. You can just write, without nesting replies.

It seems that a lot of the novelty here is that these services do not do the things that online social networks do (which is category #2, below).

So where is this headed? In short, bots. We’re starting to talk directly to algorithms — by issuing commands while we talk to each other. The chat screen is becoming action-oriented: you can order a cab, book a meeting, throw down a lunch order, and get things done while you type. You can also chat with a sleep expert algorithm. WhatsApp is going to help us communicate with businesses that we want to hear from. The chat window is also a naturalistic way for algorithms to talk back to us and even, perhaps, talk on behalf of us. There is a lot of scope to reimagine how smartphone (and watch) notifications fit into this group, and how smartphones may ‘regress’ into what they were like before (i.e., no apps) as we continue down this path.

Group #2. Broadcasting: Getting boring

The novelty of messaging is that it stands in constrast with the infamous status update. This is the primary mode of ‘conversing’ on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn. These kinds of feeds started out as a linear list of events that were sorted by when they occurred. Everything that you post becomes part of your profile; your digital history accumulates for anyone to relive at any time.

To give credit where it is due: this category introduced the likes, +1s, shares, stars, favourites and other ways to give feedback without actually needing to say any words. This group also introduced and popularised command-like text: we were not RT’ing, HT’ing, MT’ing, via’ing, #hashtagging, and @-replying before the feed became our primary mode of online conversation. However, this group also introduced trolling, online shaming, and pull-to-refresh FOMO.

This medium is now being redesigned, with most of the efforts seeming to go into re-sorting the feed, and moving away from time-sorted and towards some kind of ‘relevance’-sorted feeds. This is the ‘while you were away,’ the ‘highlights,’ the ‘top stories,’ and all the other variants that broadly remind me of turning on a television news channel: “if you’re just joining us right now, our top stories this hour are…”

The recurring difficulty that I’ve heard about the broadcast category is that you don’t really ‘converse’ with status updates. You announce. A friend (note: who does not do anything machine learning related) was the first to point out that re-ranking his newsfeed is surfacing the content of contacts who post the most, which also tends to be the most boring stuff (albeit perhaps the most ‘liked’). Muting them just surfaces the 2nd most boring contact’s onslaught of content, and he is having to resort to manually searching for people he cares about. In doing so, this is pushing him away from these services altogether.

The relationship between ranking, time, and status remains unsolved, and something needs to be done to keep it relevant.

Group #3. Digests: Quietly growing.

Introverts, rejoice! The third group is about one-way conversations. It is about content that takes time to consume. These used to be the editorials, the magazines, the books that we would sit down with — and become fully immersed. They are not real-time, they are you-time.

I came across this category when I noticed how many newsletters/digests I had subscribed to: coaching tips about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, reading digests from investment firms, data science curiosities, and digests of curated web content. These are emails that I’m happy to leave sitting somewhere until I have the time and focus to read them.

This category is part of the interesting conversation around slowing down media consumption to a human pace. There are interesting examples emerging that highlight how this category is evolving towards algorithmically curated content. Both Medium and Quora now send their personalised digests, which I find broadly interesting. Spotify’s Discover Weekly (emphasis mine) is a great example of distilling what could otherwise be a constant, fast, real-time, ‘keep-going’ experience of music discovery into a weekly event (that I look forward to).

Group #4: Unclassified & Missing

Where do these fit? The three groups above don’t cater to a number of big names, which mostly seem to overlap between different categories. YouTube comes to mind immediately as a place where there is a lot of great content that would fit the Digest, Broadcast, and Messaging groups. Instagram splits the crowd — between a Broadcast, visual Message, and Digest of memories. Productivity tools like Trello allow us to converse in a thematic, structured way, and digest work done while we plan ahead. Tinder has popularised the swipe-feed, which is sorted like a stack rather than a list: it looks like a variant of the Broadcast group, freed of temporal constraints and limited to a binary yes/no feedback. And, yesterday I received a Message-type email (“I’m here”) as well as a Digest-type one (1,000+ words). Good ol’ email keeps eluding any kind of consistency.

Finally, a missing group. How do we introspect — converse with our own data, whether this be about our fitness, health, or other? I’ve ranted a few times about the inadequacies of dashboards, which are not fit for purpose. The analogy I tend to use is that if Netflix took this approach, it would be telling you that 58% of the time, you watch action movies, rather than recommending the next one you may be interested in.

Do you have any thoughts? Let me know. (Find a way to converse with me.)