I get frustrated really quickly to send emails when I am in my office.  I would much rather pick up the phone, walk over to an office or use Instant Messenger.  Since I am somewhat of a geek, IM usually takes precedence.  IM is such a great productivity tool for 1 plain and simple reason:  It instantly closes the feedback loop.  This concept is so under-rated its almost startling.  In a nano-wave society who wants to wait?

But the relevance of this feedback loop goes further than that.  In fact I think it’s an oft overlooked part of most web platforms that make them so appealing (at least the ones that let people express opinions). Of course, blogs have the much beleaguered commenting systems (which are getting better with Disqus.com and others).  Twitter makes great use of this by allowing people to broadcast blast replies in the same way you would the original message. Some would say that FriendFeed even goes a step further and allows comment threads on broadcasted messages/etc.  Really, the platform is irrelevant.  People are following these platforms for the content and the opinions of people they respect, and will usually carry some sort of an opinion themselves.

So, long story short, take notice when you are developing a platform that involves allowing users to broadcast messages.  You probably want to build some way for users to respond to information flow from other users of that system.  If there isn’t a way to close that feedback loop, users will feel abandoned and quickly gravitate towards the millions of OTHER ways to communicate via the Intarwebs.