May we please retire that technological dinosaur known as voicemail?

Human beings are primarily visual creatures, and our aural canals offer a problematically thin reed for trying to communicate with each other. The telephone, and especially voicemail, has been plagued by extremely limited bandwidth and all sorts of interface problems. The only worse use of our senses to communicate would be Smellmail (“exhale through your left nostril to delete, through your right nostril to save…”). Or maybe Tastemail.

The New York Times recently took up the topic of whether voicemail is obsolete:

When it was introduced in the early 1980s, voice mail was hailed as a miracle invention — a boon to office productivity and a godsend to busy households. [...]

But in an age of instant information gratification, the burden of having to hit the playback button — or worse, dial in to a mailbox and enter a pass code — and sit through “ums” and “ahs” can seem too much to bear.

Many dread the process or… avoid it altogether, raising the question: is voice mail on its way to becoming obsolete?

The answer is yes. Voicemail may have been useful once upon a time, but there’s no reason to put up with it any longer.

Those of us afflicted with comically short attention spans tend to have especially strong feelings about this; such is my own loathing for voicemail that I haven’t even bothered to check my personal messages since sometime in 2006.¹ After all, technology marches ever on, and a bevy of superior options for time-shifted communication are now possible with email, text messages, and social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, or your other favorite Web 2.0 app.

New tools from Google, Apple, and others are helping to ease the migration from voicemail by moving voice messages into our visual inbox. I’ll review my favorite of these tools, Google Voice, in the days ahead.

1. Friends and family know this; unsolicited callers don’t. It’s a good filtering system! [↩]