Just call me Hiroo.

You know--Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who didn't get the memo World War II was over until 1974. I was that way with IM.

Working at CNET back in 1996, it seemed like everyone on earth went with instant messaging, but I stood pat with e-mail. Why? Like so many of my life's little stances, I can't remember anymore.

Today, e-mail is choked with garbage, and I think that's the best reason for IM.

I think it had something to do with thinking IM was an unseemly waste of time, just another way to goof off in an industry that didn't exactly need more of those. For example, my office was less than two minutes away from a massage place, a video arcade, a foosball parlor, and a phalanx of Coke machines--and that was without leaving the building.

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.

I IM'd three of my IM peeps to find out why they like it.

Brian: Hey, I'm writing about IM in my next column. What's the essence of it?
Rafe Needleman (with his characteristically analytical take): presence is a key part of it. i know if you're there when i send a message to you. that's something you can't do either with e-mail or phone

Brian: OK, OK, I'll admit it, IM is cool But why?
Joni Blecher (with her usual larkish take): oh, easy--it's just like passing notes in class.

Brian: Brainstorming for my column: Why do you think IM is cool?
Stacy (my wife, as catty as a woman with five cats should be): you can be far more explicit than you can be on your work e-mail--i.e., bitching about your boss's awful new shoes w/o leaving a trace in the company's server logs. and one more a neat freak like you will appreciate: less crap to have to delete from your in- and out-box.

Tell me why you dig IM--or why you're the next technology Hiroo Onoda. After all, I have to hand the baton to someone.

Now bigger and dorkier than ever!
That's the direction of restaurant pagers, those items restaurants hand out so that the staff can beep you when your table is ready.

Now, it has been my experience that such things are the best way to scare off a patron, short of having "Crappy food and lots of it®" cross-stitched above the door. But I've been desperate a few times and found myself waiting at the bar, sipping a Bud Lite, nibbling on food-service guacamole, and gripping one of these things with a desultory expression on my face.

Last weekend was such an occasion, at a bar with a few buddies after golf. One of them came back with this thing that looked like a really large, black-plastic ashtray. Since we were in San Francisco, I knew an ashtray would be felonious, so it had to be something else.

On closer examination I saw it was the Glowster restaurant pager from Jtech. Not only does it vibrate when you're summoned, it also blinks an array of LEDs, and it has a little plastic billboard on top advertising a drink special. Normally, one must travel to a border town and attend a cockfight to experience so much indignity.

I was so bemused, I hauled out the Treo and snapped a shot of it (pictured to the right).

As I turned the thing over in my hands, I imagined the only reason it would need to be so large is either the Soviets convinced Jtech that vacuum-tube technology is the future or restaurants are afraid people would somehow lose anything smaller. That seemed even more stupid.

Then John said, "I like this thing--means I can go ahead and get saucy-ass drunk and they'll buzz me when the feed trough's ready."

OK, so it's the latter.

Crybaby
A couple of days ago, a TV news crew interviewed me about this story, the one about the woman suing Hotmail for incinerating a bunch of her e-mails and files, wanting to know my take on it. I think they were expecting me to blast Hotmail like every other two-bit tech pundit out there. Maybe that explains why their mouths hung agape when I savaged the user who sued Hotmail instead.

C'mon, the first part of freemail is free. She got every penny's worth of data protection she paid for.

C'mon, the first part of freemail is free. She got every penny's worth of data protection she paid for. Hotmail has no specific responsibility to any individual but, rather, a general responsibility to provide a decent service. It's the same legal tenet that applies to the cops--you can't sue them because they failed to stop some guy from shooting you.

Free is as free does.