Essential characteristics of modern communication tools

Essential characteristics of modern communication tools.

Ownership

• Encryption
• We want all our communication to be encrypted end to end and that nobody but ourselves should possess the encryption keys.
• Metadata
• We want to control who knows anything about our communication, whether we authored it or it was addressed to us.

Archiving

• Retention
• We want the right to retain or dispose of our stuff as we please.
• Backup
• We want to be able to backup and archive our conversations.
• Data portability
• We expect to be able to transport our stuff from one platform to another.

Control

• Large scale
• We want to scale our conversations up to any number of specific persons or to the public generally.
• Public entry points to chat rooms
• We want to easily invite others to join our conversations.
• Throttling and Muting
• We want to control the ability of others to communicate with us based on our private sense of context and relationship.

Tools

• Browser
• We want to communicate using a browser
• Attachments
• We want to be able to 'attach' files and documents of any description as remote links.
• Collaborative editing
• We want to share documents remotely, for viewing, listening and editing.

Text

• Rich text
• We want to format text as rich text
• Liking
• We want to be able to "like" the instant messages of others.
• Emoticons
• We want ways to abbreviate our text communication.

Timing

• Real Time.
• We want real time communication;  text, voice and video.
• Messaging
• We also want messaging (delayed delivery); text, voice and video.

Extensibility

• Extensions via API
• We want developers to show us new ways of using our communication tools.

(Hat tip to Phil Wolf)