Editor's Note: Regular readers will have realized by now that our interest in instant messaging transcends simple chatting with friends or tracking the ways IM is changing the way coworkers communicate.

We cover products like IMified or Sandy, which let their users turn IM into an organizational tool. We thought we'd like IM-based RSS monitors that worked a little more reliably than most available today, but at the same time, Twitter is being pressed into service to serve practically the same purpose, if you care to follow the New York Times, BBC news or Slashdot.

When it's used as a more impersonal information pipeline, IM's doing something people have wanted the Internet to do since the pre-Web era: deliver information with a certain crisp efficiency and effortlessness that feels like "The Future."

We remember a period in the '80s when electronic data troves were available only via e-mail. At the time, it didn't seem like an imposition to send an e-mail request for a collection's catalog, then another request (worded ever-so-carefully) for the documents that interested us. In fact, it was immensely satisfying. Out went the request, then back came a message on the terminal a while later telling us our documents had arrived. Maybe it wasn't on the level of George Jetson resting in his easy chair while robotic attendants swapped out his work shoes for loafers, popped his pipe into his mouth and handed him his paper, but it was still, well, kind of cool.

Something that arrived hand-in-hand with the simple utility of services like that was a certain unease about personal computing. Anyone who remembers mainstream home computing magazines from the '80s -- RUN, COMPUTE!, or Ahoy!) -- will remember that along with hand-cramping MLX sessions) and earnest reviews of tape drive accelerators came any number of ads and articles that began with the words "Take control of ..." something. The ads featured pictures of computing enthusiasts wrapped in unruly coils of tractor-feed paper ("Take control of your printer!") or assorted cartoon renderings of snarling peripherals ("Take control of your modem!")

And if you picked up a book that introduced BASIC programming in the '80s, you probably had the opportunity to type in something like this:

10 INPUT "Hi, what is your name? ", NAME$
20 PRINT "Hello, "; NAME$; ", how may I serve you?"

It did not, you'll note, offer a response like "How may I seize control of your home, lash you into your recliner and feed on your biological energy?" We had "War Games," it's true. But you certainly didn't start off a child's lifelong career of hunting and pecking innumerable GOTOs and GOSUBs with the specter of cybernetic annihilation.

It would be tempting to think of products marketed on their capacity to restore order to unruly modems and printers, or sample programs that amounted to so much whistling past the graveyard, as quaint products of a bygone era. The cheapest, simplest smartphone is much more sophisticated than a VIC-20, and nobody's afraid of a BlackBerry, right?

But consider a service like Sandy, which is relatively new and somewhat sophisticated.

Sandy presents itself as a helpful e-mail assistant -- a cheerful Girl Friday of sorts -- that opens the reminder messages it sends with a cheery "Hola, Mike!" and goes so far out of its way to be friendly and accessible that its designers have stuck, with a certain perverse doggedness, to Comic Sans. What could be less threatening than a friendly, attractive secretary who's just dim enough to use Comic Sans for everything?

"I'm flexible!" chirps Sandy on an introductory page, "Tweak my settings so that they work for you."

It's in a world with Sandy that NPR listeners will be spending this week's "Morning Edition" episodes listening to a series about e-mail overload entitled "Make It Stop! Crushed by Too Many E-Mails," which will seem like old hat to New York Times readers, who read "Struggling to Evade the E-Mail Tsunami" in April, and "Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast" on Monday.

Those articles are about e-mail, it's true, but we offer up two pieces of anecdotal evidence to suggest that the IM information pipeline is becoming just as burdensome:

First, there was the research for our recent article on IM-based RSS monitors. We knew such services existed, because we remembered news of them winging around the blogosphere a few short years ago. In the process of trying to find a few that worked, though, we discovered that abandoned projects in that niche created a sort of software fossil layer that Internet archaeologists working a century from now may well identify as "The Late IM Enthusiasm Age."

For the ones we did find that were still functional, the enthusiastic buzz from tech blogs that greeted them in 2005 or 2006 was markedly diminished, and we found ourselves unsubscribing from them once we'd finished reviewing them.

Second, in the process of assembling an IM directory for editors in our own company, we offered a simple form that offered these choices to those registering their addresses:

• I prefer e-mail to IM for all but the most urgent or time-sensitive work-related matters.
• I prefer IM to e-mail.
• I don't use IM for work. Please contact me via e-mail or phone.

The overwhelming majority responded with "I prefer e-mail to IM for all but the most urgent or time-sensitive work-related matters," and "I don't use IM for work. Please contact me via e-mail or phone," edged out "I prefer IM to e-mail" for a distant second place finish.

In other words, e-mail may be a "crushing" "tsunami" or "beast," but it still beats IM among our coworkers.

That bodes ill for the weather-delivering IM bots of the world.