To be honest for me it's all a bit odd. It's like, I just don't fit into socializing in $CURRENT_YEAR with ordinary people. I feel a bit like an old fuddy.
WhatsApp has some weird thing whereby I need a smartphone and a telephone number and shit.
Facebook - let's not even go there.
My ideal communication feels like call > e-mail. SMS possibly as an ephemeral 'i'm outside the museum, i can see you from here' type thing.
Basically anything else I just don't really get (for one on one). IM is so distracting that unless I'm doing something mindless like playing a video game, I'd be better off in a call.
IM's good if you're at your desk shooting the shit with your friends/coworkers. Unlike the phone, it's asynchronous, so you can reply when it's convenient. You also don't have to worry about eavesdroppers. It's better than SMS because a longer SMS ends up getting split over multiple messages and they can sometimes get stuck in the ether for a while, and you can use your keyboard instead of holding your phone and making it obvious that you're not working. It's better than e-mail because you don't want a gazillion one-sentence emails of BS going back and forth.
I generally keep email for "official" business or more thought-out messages to friends, Hangouts for more banal chit-chat, and I can always go back and search that if it turns into a more important conversation. SMS for the few weirdos who don't do Hangouts, and then voice is an absolute last resort. Real-time telecommunication just demands too much immediate attention- whomever I'm speaking to will say something that leads my mind to wander off and I'll miss a sentence or two, and then I can't go back and re-read what was said. Hate, hate, HATE calls!
Even though I prefer email to all other protocols, that would be a great way to kill my inbox. It seems a but counter intuitive, but having so many chat/communication standards acts as a way to organize all my messaging activity. Email is formal, SMS is slightly less formal but more direct, Whatsapp is completely informal but more convenient for casual conversations than SMS, and though I don't use Facebook Messenger I'm sure it has a spot somewhere in there.
I mean certainly you could build that bidirectionally with their APIs, except for the SMS, though I suppose you could with a Twilio number or something. But the flow is so different. I might exchange twenty one-line messages with someone over Facebook. That would be pure hell in email.
