Today's Whole House Intercom

When I was a kid, my Grandfather had a whole house intercom, which I always equated with having a "nice house". While the concept of whole house intercoms still exists today, there are far better ways to communicate between rooms and floors within a building.

This first started to become clear to me when people started to use e-mail to check on each others whereabouts. Saw this in the corporate world first, but it soon spread to the home and SMB worlds as soon as multiple PCs started to show up in these worlds. While e-mail works, it has no presence (i.e. is the person you are trying to reach actually sitting at the PC).

Next came Instant Messaging, which added the concept of presence to the communication channel so you knew if the person you were trying to reach was actually available. This is still viable today in PC-centric environments and where IM clients are available on mobile devices.

The latest way we see this happening is via texting aka Short Messaging System "SMS". While it lacks the presence of IM clients, the fact that text-centric folks carry their phones / texting devices with them everywhere (and I mean everywhere) allows you to assume the person you are trying to reach is available. In my own house my kids will text their parents and each other with such benign questions as "when is dinner?".

Of course using texting as a replacement for other modes of communication should only be done when your texting plan contains unlimited texting or your whole house intercom replacement will end up costing you more then a whole house intercom system :)