i vote “jabber/xmpp” or “irc”

and yes: that _really_ is what i use most
my irc-client is always open in screen (and connected to freenode+euIRC) and a supplied all my family with xmpp-clients (that’s gotten a bit harder since gmail closed their servers)

SMS? I never used that.
E-Mail? That’s that thing amazon uses to spam me with “you just bought foo” and where i consume some comment-updates on lesser pages.
Phone? I always hated needing to talk to people. You can’t look up what has been said later.

I never really communicated over any of those. At least not primarily.
There always was a better way around.

btw: @luke, if you can read this, the proxy-issue has been solved :-)

IRC is also my choice! Second one is Steam. Both of them are used by most of my friends, so I don’t need to use Facebooks/other stuff to connect.

If its work stuff or something more important, I would prefer email.

Your poll is missing IRC, which truly is my first choice.
Since this post talks about modern communication changes, I will also mention that it is via tmux + weechat, with push notifications on hilights ^_-

I voted skype, although I’ve never used the video chat, 100% of my communication is done by either IM or in person. I have skype, gtalk and steam running on my pc 24/7, and anyone that know me knows if they want to talk, it’s gonna have to be on one of those.

I don’t have a phone, because my prepaid sim expired over a year ago, I only ever had it for receiving.
If I could afford a smartphone and internet for it, I would buy a new one for that.
I’m ‘essentially’ not on any social networks, not because I’m against them in any way, but just because I can’t be bothered. I say ‘essentially’ because I do have a facebook account, but I never check it, the only reason I have it is to post pictures of things my family wants to see, so I log in, upload them, log out.
My email box has become nothing but youtube subs and newsletters from sites that I actually want, I never send out emails or receive any from an actual person.

Email is now a junk haven for most ppl.
Causing it to be less likely to be looked at like: OMG I got an email.
It’s too bad, since it’s like that with me because I Report Spam just about anything I don’t want to read.

G+’s pretty cool now that they’re linking their social circle idea with their email platform,
Pretty soon they’ll use G+ for your email. But then again Orkut is still alive and well, so what do I know…

Google Plus and its attendant Hangouts. Kinda mixing the Failbook and Twitter headings above with the Skype/Face time. Follow that with email. So, despite email being in second place, that’s where my vote landed.

For various reasons, I don’t have a phone, FB or Twitter account, so my options are pretty limited.

Staying in touch is mostly done through Gmail’s built in messenger, and I still do use email for long form conversations. I have to say even that’s declining, because my acquaintances have moved on to other channels.

The service I miss the most is Google Reader’s built in sharing network, which was excised an year before Google Reader itself shut down. Four years ago, everyone I cared to have intelligent conversations with was on Google Reader and used to share and comment on articles among themselves.

So yeah, I’m pretty much out of the loop these days. All the loops.

PS: Any reason commenting from behind proxies is disabled? Discovered today I couldn’t comment on this post from work.

@ Luke Maciak:
Actually, I preferred the serifed font for your blog. I generally dislike sans-serifed fonts for any text longer than, say, you would see on twitter.

As for communications, I use SMS primarily with friends, and email for long communications, or communications relevant to my university work. I really dislike phone conversations, and always have done.

@ MrJones2015:

No clue what you are talking about. The font is totally Sans-Serif over here. You may need to refresh the page to see it though. :P

Honestly though, I thought Serif looked kinda nice. Not sure if I like this one. How does it look? Any suggestions on good web fonts to use?

@ Chris Wellons:

Uh, I hate when students email me homework. The Uni sends out so much organizational spam that student mail drowns in it. I just make them use Blackboard for electronic submissions. It has the nice side effect that each assignment is directly tied to a grading column.

The downside is that Blackboard is very slow and cumbersome. :(

I forgot about pure IM. I guess that was covered by Skype partially. I do IM from time to time but I no longer use the “traditional” networks. For me it’s either Facebook IM or Steam IM and more rarely Google Messaging on the Gmail sidebar. :P

A result of completely changing my e-mail setup is that I’ve become a lot more e-mail oriented, because managing e-mail is now much more enjoyable. E-mail is actually a pretty great interface to a number of different kinds of systems. For example, did you know that GitHub has an e-mail API? It’s possible to manage nearly everything about a project on GitHub entirely through Git and an e-mail client. Visiting with a web browser is just one interface to the system.

It’s not in your poll this time, but I still use instant messaging a lot. That’s my short-form communication. I nearly ditched cell phones about 4 years ago — I never SMS and 99% of my calls are to my wife to tell her I’m on my way home from work. I don’t do any social networking type of stuff, so that’s off the list, too.

This fall I’ve been grading homework for a programming class that a work associate teaches. My contact with the class is entirely through e-mail: students e-mail their homework to me and I e-mail back their grades. The semester is now 1/3 of the way done and, so far, grading by e-mail has been a very organized experience. Mail threads act as a rough, immutable, shared version control system, since grades and submissions sometimes change as feedback is incorporated.