overview

email

SMS

MMS

IM

chat

community

news

traffic

management










related:

Spam

Blogs

Networks

Defamation

Copyright

Postal
Systems

     Overview

For most of the online population the internet arguably has had its major impact through electronic messaging (in particular email) rather than graphic-rich Flash-infested web sites, downloading feature films or online retailing. This profile points to resources regarding internet and associated messaging systems: email, IM, chat, SMS and MMS.

It covers some technical aspects of messaging and highlights academic and market studies. It also points to writing about online communities, bulletin boards and newsgroups.

     content of this profile

The following pages cover -

Email - technical primers, regulatory issues (in particular spam, defamation, copyright and privacy), hoaxes, and developments such as ENUM and Rich Media

SMS - writing about Short Message Services (SMS), including pointers to use of SMS for advertising and claims that it has underpinned 'people power' in some emerging economies

MMS - Multimedia Messaging Services

IM - proprietary Instant Messaging (IM) services

chat - IRC and other chat

community - netiquette, flaming, moderation and commoditization of 'communities'

news - impact and management of email news services and newsgroups

message traffic - data about the volume and use (or abuse) of email and SMS, with benchmarks from the postal systems and voice traffic

management - hints about managing identity and the message environment

     related pages

This profile complements other documentation on this site. There is a separate page on Spam - looking at statistics, economics, activist groups and legislation - as part of the Security & InfoCrime Guide, with a detailed profile on regulation of spam in Australia and New Zealand.

There is also a profile on web logs (blogs) - an electronic publishing genre that combines the ease of email and the potentially global exposure of web pages - and one on 'virtual worlds' such as MUDs and MOOs.

     background

For a general introduction we recommend Jacob Palme's Electronic Mail (Norwood: Artech House 1995) and his more self-congratulatory paper The Future of Email. Andrew Odlyzko's characteristically perceptive 2001 paper Content is Not King and 2003 paper The Many Paradoxes of Broadband suggest that connectivity - in particular email - is the 'killer app' until a new infrastructure allows large-scale access to rich media applications such as Video on Demand.




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