Cooley's main reason for liking instant messaging is disliking email.

But today e-mail is choked with garbage, and I think that's the best reason for IM. I run two spam filters just to get down to 300 spam messages in my in-box each day. People I need to reach aren't responsive to e-mail anymore; they seem to check it every few hours or so, probably dreading the onslaught of spam and tedious threads that await them.

IM restores that rapid-fire pungency e-mail used to have, an electronic version of someone sticking their head in your office door.

My email filters are about 75 percent effective in identifying detritus and depositing it in my Junk and Trash folders. I weed through the rest. I don't believe IMing would make much difference in how much email I receive. I already route real life communicants to email addresses that I don't publish, so I know to check those accounts often.

I suspect Brian Cooley's real motivation for IMing is the immediacy he refers to as "rapid-fire pungency." There was a time, years ago, when I might have said the same thing. But, as more words than I care to think about have come and gone from and to me on the Internet, I've become less eager to have someone stick his head in my office door. Email me instead.

Note: This entry also appeared at Mac-a-ro-nies.