After a week of being disconnected from my computer and the Internet, I can truthfully say that I felt good about it. No email or blogging withdrawal symptoms, albeit a few other symptoms that come with visiting Egypt (more about the trip in another post).

Having been away for exactly seven days, I was able to assess what one-way flow of personal (i.e. not work related) communications I receive in a week.

It goes like this:

Hotmail (joint account with my wife) had 153 emails of which 13 were in the junk inbox (but I would add that the junk filter caught one legitimate mail). 30 were “forwarded” messages (jokes, chain letters, etc.); 30 were newsletters (for which I have opted in); and 20 were from the kids’ school. Eight were notifications of one or other site (just four comments on the blog). And the remainder were more or less personal communications. (Note that a 2006 ‘Yahoo Asks‘ post suggests that there are in excess of 62 billion emails per day worldwide).

Facebook: 18 notifications, 9 new friend requests, 6 mails in the inbox and 6 other requests (group, new app…). I also am happy to say that my “Ancient Vampire” (left) recruited a net of 3 new acolytes (+4-1).

Linkedin: 14 messages and 1 new connection.

Twitter: just over 400 hundred of messages from my 56 followees. One new follower request. My sms notification has been switched off (not sure why).

Plaxo: 2 messages.

Viadeo: 0

Marzar: 2 new connections.

This Blog: average number of site visitors dropped to 20 from 30 per day. RSS feed is holding consistently at 32.

Including the barrage of Twitter (I am not going to count Jaiku or Orkut), I received a total of 611 messages. This means that I received 87 “messages” per day or 3.6 per hour. Per my calculations, this would mean that over 3/4 of the messages were not directed personally to me. If I remove the Twitter messages from the calculation, the ratio of “personal” messages moves back to what appears to be a reasonable 47%. But, the question is whether that is a good level considering the filters and CRM capabilities that are now available?

Had I had an outgoing “long absence” message, this might have meant I received a few less messages. On the other hand, since I didn’t reply to any of the messages, this number was a little restrained (for those of you who know me, I am typically a rapid fire responder).

What strikes me is that, today, the number of sources of messages has mushroomed and, if Twitter-type communications is included, I have only 1/4 of my messages coming via traditional emails (i.e. via hotmail).

Which bright young entrepreneur will create a site to do the above communication aggregation for me?

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