Communication woes

When you are a part of millions + 3 Web 2.0 websites with friends, or followers, or whatever they're called - what's the best way to communicate with your friends?  Email makes most sense to me! But I'm thinking it would be annoying to get emails that just have like a one line comment.  

Maybe comments are to email as text messages are to phone calls (comment : email : : text message : phone call)?

Where to leave comments? Isn't it weird for that stuff to be in public?

Also, amazed at how much time it must take for people to do this 2.0 stuff, but I'm going to keep keeping on.

In other web-related news, cross-browser compatibility issues should suck it!  A client asked me to put music and her website (generally not recommended but whatever) and I couldn't believe how difficult this turned out to be for it to work in all five of my browsers.  Old fashioned way? Nope.  Using JS to make this all better?  Nope.  Only good solution? Flash - and still not everyone has this!  I'm not really a flash person, so here's a site with an easy way to do this for free.