The Death of Email (is being prematurely reported)
Friends of mine who are active on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are fond of proclaiming that email is dead. And, certainly, those of us who are active on these networks send less email to each other than we used to. I'm much more likely to direct message, tweet, or write on someone's wall if I have a quick question, comment or information referral for someone, the latter two if it's a question or info that I might benefit from having other people in my online community see.
But I don't see these alternatives as ships carrying the grim reaper onto email's shores -- I think they're more likely the saviors of email. As I said a couple of weeks ago in my "Myth of KISS" post, email applications are heavily abused, and they're not very good at managing large amounts of information. This hasn't stopped a good 90% of the people online from using email as their primary information aggregator. We get:
in our email inboxes every day. The inbox places new messages on top and older messages scroll down and out of sight. Almost every email program on earth lets you, as you make time for it, pull emails into named folders, mark them as important, order them by name or date or subject, search for them, and archive them to some other part of your storage space, but none of them do more than some basic filtering and prioritizing for you, perhaps IDing 90% of the spam and, if you're a power user, allowing you to place messages from certain people in special folders.
The exception to the standard email processing rules is Google's GMail, which does innovative threading and labeling, allowing for, in my opinion, a superior tool for information management, but it's still a lot of work. The tools will improve, but it's kind of like hiring a better maid service to clean up congress - they'll make the halls shinier, but the same legislators will show up for work on the next day.
The answer is to acknowledge that email applications, as we know them, were never meant to process upwards of twenty or thirty messages a day. The information management defaults assume a manageable number of items, and many of us are way past that threshold. The power of alternative messaging mediums is that they are tailored to the types of messages they deliver, and their tools sets are accordingly more refined and targeted. If you get newsletters and alerts in your email, switch to RSS. If you do a lot of short messages or work coordination, look at IM. If you announce or broadcast information, or survey your contacts, use Twitter or Facebook. These mediums are, so far, much less susceptible to spam, and you can ignore messages once you've read them or skipped them, they don't have to be deleted. The closer you get to only receiving personal email in your inbox, the easier it will be to keep up with it
So these new mediums aren't gunning to eliminate our old, old electronic friend - they're just allowing it to go on a long overdue diet.
But I don't see these alternatives as ships carrying the grim reaper onto email's shores -- I think they're more likely the saviors of email. As I said a couple of weeks ago in my "Myth of KISS" post, email applications are heavily abused, and they're not very good at managing large amounts of information. This hasn't stopped a good 90% of the people online from using email as their primary information aggregator. We get:
- Personal emails
- Mailing List items
- ENewsletters
- Automated alerts
- Spam!
- and a host of other things
in our email inboxes every day. The inbox places new messages on top and older messages scroll down and out of sight. Almost every email program on earth lets you, as you make time for it, pull emails into named folders, mark them as important, order them by name or date or subject, search for them, and archive them to some other part of your storage space, but none of them do more than some basic filtering and prioritizing for you, perhaps IDing 90% of the spam and, if you're a power user, allowing you to place messages from certain people in special folders.
The exception to the standard email processing rules is Google's GMail, which does innovative threading and labeling, allowing for, in my opinion, a superior tool for information management, but it's still a lot of work. The tools will improve, but it's kind of like hiring a better maid service to clean up congress - they'll make the halls shinier, but the same legislators will show up for work on the next day.
The answer is to acknowledge that email applications, as we know them, were never meant to process upwards of twenty or thirty messages a day. The information management defaults assume a manageable number of items, and many of us are way past that threshold. The power of alternative messaging mediums is that they are tailored to the types of messages they deliver, and their tools sets are accordingly more refined and targeted. If you get newsletters and alerts in your email, switch to RSS. If you do a lot of short messages or work coordination, look at IM. If you announce or broadcast information, or survey your contacts, use Twitter or Facebook. These mediums are, so far, much less susceptible to spam, and you can ignore messages once you've read them or skipped them, they don't have to be deleted. The closer you get to only receiving personal email in your inbox, the easier it will be to keep up with it
So these new mediums aren't gunning to eliminate our old, old electronic friend - they're just allowing it to go on a long overdue diet.
Labels: Communication, data management, Social Networking, software, Web 2.0
Subscribe through Feedburner
7 Comments:
Considering the extent to which spamming has found it's way into email (I think the number is now above 80% of all mail is spam), I would be more than happy for email to take an even more distant backseat to texting, tweeting, wall-writing, etc. as a means for casual digital communications.
Email a great tool unfortunately due to spam I can understand the mixed feelings concerning email. Rather than doing away with email something more effective and aggressive needs to be done about spam.
I don't disagree with the thrust of your argument, but I don't think we can easily disregard the appeal of consolidation that email offers. It may be a poor medium for more ephemeral things better left to RSS or IM, and spam is a huge problem. But why are most ordinary people (including me) still willing to suffer through upwards of one or two hundred emails a day? Because it's all in one place. The real challenge is getting ordinary people to monitor multiple information streams, and giving them more integrated tools to make it easy.
But, Eric - my point is that the one place that it's all in was never intended to handle all of that. If you're getting hundreds of messages a day in your email inbox, every one of which has to be actively dealt with in order to get it out of your inbox, then you are spending a large amount of time identifying, deleting, archiving, moving to folders, tagging, whatever. With so much electronic communication being either clearly disposable or archived elsewhere, why use a program that demands that you clean it all up? What is the value of "one place", if that place is a mess?
I would argue that, if your inbox is receiving a tenth of the online information that I receive via Google Reader, Twitter, and email, then you are either spending four times as much time as I am maintaining that info, or your inbox has thousands of messages in it. In other words, the benefits of having all of it one place are, to my mind, highly suspect. If you move a lot of the automated, informational info to an RSS reader, which can be scanned and then ignored, you might get another hour's sleep a night or spend more quality time with your loved ones. :)
Peter, I don't disagree with a word you just said. I am just not sure the masses will get there any time soon. The QWERTY layout is far from the most best keyboard interface ever developed -- others have proposed far more efficient designs -- but it's the one that stuck. Social scientists call this "path dependence." The best design doesn't always win.
Long-term, you may well be right. Short-term, I know that a lot of the e-constituents I serve are still exclusively focused on email, for better or for worse.
That does bring up a good point, Eric - while I advocate that people look at RSS Readers, Twitter and other advances in information and communications technology, I definitely don't advice that NPOs ignore email as
the (still) most effective online channel for reaching their constituents. If I convince every Idealware reader (who hasn't already been converted) to be a good consumer of RSS and alternate communication streams, I'll have converted something like .000000000001 of the population. We have a ways to go. :)
I'm already experiencing the death of email. Half my clients are not getting my emails due to increased spam blockage. So I resort to phone calling.
However, phone calling is a slow process when you got 2,000 clients. So I looked for help. I hired a call center and sent all my clients a message that got delivered with zero spam blockage. I used a service called "voice mail courier" by a company called voicelogic.com. Email is great, but spam is killing it, so I must return to the old phone.
Post a Comment
<< Home