It's no secret at this point that how we communicate with each other is a big pet topic of mine. It's also no secret that short, preferably instant messages work a million times better than wordy e-mails which pile up on you. Of course these short messages are mostly web based, which means more often then not you need to be around a browser which means someone is getting traffic out of you getting messages. It's not a bad thing, and not shocking at all that everyone is rushing out to include personal messaging on their site. (Hell, it's something we're looking at with Metroblogging as well.) While each one of these services is pretty great, the issue I'm having now is I really don't want yet *another* place to have to go check messages. Here's a quick, off the top of my head sample of places where I get messages online:

[clockwise from top left: Gmail, Plazes, Facebook, Pownce, Vox, Suicide Girls, Chess on the Web, Virb, I'm In Like With You, MySpace, Flickr, Twitter]

And that's far from all the systems I have accounts on and receive messages at. Let's not forgot Jaiku, Netscape, Skype, etc... With yesterday's launch of pownce I ended up talking to people about it frequently throughout the day. It's a cool enough site, seems to work pretty well at this point with the extremely limited number of people on it, and for the most part does what it's trying to do. At one point yesterday it was described as "Facebook, but with only the inbox" and was joking with Posh about how the one big benefit to all these different platforms would be if you wanted to be all cloak and dagger and have conversations that people would never be able to follow. "I'll send you a note on twitter, you reply on pownce, I'll get back to you on VOX, and then you confirm on flickr." Of course all of these systems are one step below actual IM which kills the need to go check messages on anything, ever.

My question, or maybe more of my request is why do we need yet another system that does the same thing and wouldn't it be so much better if someone built something that tied all these things together? My entire goal with getting away from e-mail is so I have less nagging in the back of my head that I might have a message waiting for me somewhere - so adding yet another website that I need to constantly look at the inbox for isn't the most appealing idea ever. Even if it has a fancy desktop app like twitteriffic or Pownce's AIR app. What I really want is one, preferably web based (though an additional desktop app would be cool) system that checks all of the inboxes, replies, direct messages, whispers and notes on all the YASNS and YASMS out there and pulls those messages into one simple place for me to look. Is that too much to ask?