There are a few standard ways of communication that established for quite some time. The most popular are: telephone, SMS and e-mail. Common to these three examples is that they are quite universal in the sense that almost everyone in the world has access to one of this and that they offer you a good reachability. Another trend is that the costs to use them are just plummeting on a day-to-day basis. From a historical perspective these have been conceived more than 40 years ago at least. It is quite remarkable that we still use them.

With the rise of the Internet and the ubiquity of it, many modern ways to communicate have emerged. Think of the social networking platform of your choice which can get you in touch with almost everyone you have ever meet in person in this planet. Even those people that you barely remember. Today, it is quite feasible to make a multi-video conference from practically any point in the planet with state of art infrastructure as a pre-requisite.

The point I want to make here is the ‘of your choice’ that I put in the previous paragraph. Unfortunately the people who want to connect with each other have to explicitly agree on the social network system that they will use to carry out the interaction.

This is the main issue: these modern systems do not talk to each other. If you have a friend using system X and you use system Y, there is no way that you can talk, unless you both are on the same system. This is like if you would have a mobile phone of brand Z, you would not able to communicate with others not owning a mobile phone of the same brand. The analogy is quite blunt but illustrates clearly what is happening with the social network systems today.

The result is that everyone has to register to many services to keep in touch with people they have contact with. It is just amazing that the big titans of the Internet cannot sit down and agree on a unique platform that allows everyone to be touch with each other while having all the benefits of the now state of art communication tools.

That is why I have to use Facebook, Whatsapp, Hangouts, Viber, Google+, Skype; although I’m not fond of all of these…