Michael Richardson argues that people want more control over how others communicate with them. Given the plethora of incoming communication channels, people are currently bombarded with both high and low priority messages on each of their messaging systems. For example, someone who just wants to say “hi” to me may contact me via a standalone instant message system like AIM, through Facebook or Gmail IMs, by e-mail, by Twitter, by text message, etc.

What Michael is really getting at is that we currently have sender-defined messaging. In short, the sender pretty much has sole control of the delivery process. As you can see from this highly-technical diagram, this makes recipients sad.

Michael is right to see this system as inefficient and, more importantly, he provides a way to solve it. While I can’t speak to the scalability or architectural problems associated with recipient-defined messaging, the net effect seems very desirable. Any incoming message will be tagged with a priority level and a sender. Routing instructions defined by the recipient will be stored somewhere (ideas?) and, taking the tags into account, will forward the message to the appropriate system.

This new system allows the recipient to define how they will be contacted. Senders also see a benefit: they can be assured that the recipient is not unduly annoyed by their message (content aside).

One other possible innovation would be to have a single messaging address for each recipient. In other words, a sender would no longer need to maintain an extensive address list for each recipient with their twitter username, their IM username, their Facebook name, and each of their e-mail addresses. Essentially, we are talking about a single digital identity (which makes this a perfect fit for OpenID).