The Lead

Yesterday, I was out of the office, checking email messages on my Treo. One series of emails eventually became a conversation that took place across two different email platforms. A conversation that could have taken place in 60 seconds took three hours.

Contrast that with an IM conversation I had with a friend who was in the stands in Kaiserslautern, Germany, watching the U.S.-Italy match. We conversed real-time about the game as he sat behind the Italian goal and I sat on the sofa and watched the match.

We are missing a huge opportunity to incorporate IM into our work lives. Imagine my first scenario done through IM. Instead of waiting for a document to clear my client’s server, clear our server and make it to my inbox, my client could have sent me an IM with the file attached, totally secure, but without the wait or the hassle of wrestling with Outlook or Yahoo! Mail.

Through an IM interface, you can webcast, conduct Internet phone calls, attach files (documents, video, audio, etc.) – and do it all through multiple devices. And if you’re still anchored to email, hop onto Google’s GMail where email and IM are integrated.

IM isn’t a complete replacement for email – archiving, sorting and searching messages remains clunky. But now is a good time to get the hang of it, if only to communicate with your kids.

L8R