September 04 2021, 22:12

Personally, I’m beginning to drown in messengers. There are just too many of them.

Besides Telegram, Skype, and the social network messenger, there are several Teams that don’t want to work together. Recently, there was also Slack. There are notifications from multiple emails, and along with those, notifications from Jira (which can also be multiple). Many service notifications cannot be aggregated. And some are actively monitoring and messaging on LinkedIn (where I have thousands of unread messages), Twitter (where nobody writes to me), WhatsApp (same story), Instagram (same story). For some, it’s also their business.

Corporate Teams can’t properly manage multiple accounts (i.e., formally it can, but switching between accounts is far from instantaneous, and you’ll think twice before clicking on a notification from an inactive account).

If you’re involved in five projects for five clients, each will give you their messenger, their email, their Jira, their Confluence, their Git. And while handling passwords is simple, Microsoft products lament, as under one user, they cannot properly work with multiple accounts simultaneously (to avoid switching).

Many clients simply send their laptop. Then comes the problem of how to work with two or three laptops on a desktop with two monitors and a keyboard.

Luckily, I don’t have such a large number of clients, but when there are even two or three, it becomes difficult.

Installing on mobile phones is even more complicated. For instance, I cannot properly install the Teams from the client I’m currently working for on a phone that already has Teams from EPAM. I mean, Microsoft formally allows it, but clicking on a notification will require switching accounts, which takes seconds.

It’s somewhat easier on laptops. To work with two Teams on one machine, I have to run one in the browser and use the app for the other. And if I need three more Teams from clients, with their login-password pairs, I will need two more browsers (choices include Safari, Chrome, Chromium, Vivaldi, Opera, Brave). Theoretically, you could somehow run the Teams application under a different user on the same machine (in Windows, this is done via runas, I haven’t figured it out on Mac yet).

Besides that, all messengers have different message histories, each with its own search, contact lists, image storages.

What could be a viable solution here? A messenger aggregator is definitely not an option, as vendors won’t go for it. They run ads and gather knowledge from what we send to each other. Honestly, users wouldn’t be happy if everything from their 20 sites with personal messages were collected into one feed, where important mixes with unimportant, without context, etc.