The (Mobile) "Atomization of Conversation"

Half.com founder Alexand First Round Capital VC Josh Kopelman wrote an interesting post about the "Atomization of Conversation". Essentially, he's referring to the trend that "geek tools" such as Facebook, Twitter, Dopplr have replaced synchronous "conversations" historically serviced by tools such as email, IM, voice (or, imagine, in person).

I find this personally interesting because of my past life at RIM where we were obsessed with "push" (Corey, what *is* push?! -- sorry, inside joke). "Push" meant that you send me an email, and it's essentially delivered immediately *and* I'm notified as soon as it arrives. We prioritized push above anything -- synchronization of deletes and message status. The rationale is best explained by Alex, a designer friend of mine (to paraphrase):

BlackBerry is basically the human equivalent of Pavlov's dogs. The email arrives, you get notified, and the "treat" you receive is the information.

It's worth noting that employees, competitors and partners of RIM still don't really understand why "push" is so compelling, and so they create standalone apps like Gmail and Yahoo!Go that are really just a pseudo-browser experience.

The real question is, how do these tools like Twitter, Dopplr, Facebook make the migration to mobile in a compelling way? Sure, they're browser-based apps to begin with but, then again, so was email in many cases.

Maybe I'm not geeky enough, but I've been using Digsby for the last few weeks and have my Facebook and Twitter accounts set up. It's tedious and disruptive getting all of the alerts from these services. We'll need to come up with some way of making these alerts valuable and relevant - the future of these tools certainly necessitates a xobni-equivalent.