> If it's late, I might send my friend an email instead of an SMS because I know that the SMS will probably wake her up, and the email won't.
> Being able to control this is a good thing.
those are great points, and a solution that can really replace the 18 methods we have of sending messages today would take that into account. Email today has this lame "importance" flag nobody uses but certainly, if we could get over the familiarity hump, having a unified kind of message where we can configure how it travels and how it alerts the receiver (not to mention, that the receiver would be able to route these various classes of messages in any way he/she sees fit) is not a huge technical issue.
> Being able to control this is a good thing.
those are great points, and a solution that can really replace the 18 methods we have of sending messages today would take that into account. Email today has this lame "importance" flag nobody uses but certainly, if we could get over the familiarity hump, having a unified kind of message where we can configure how it travels and how it alerts the receiver (not to mention, that the receiver would be able to route these various classes of messages in any way he/she sees fit) is not a huge technical issue.