The future of Ye Olde Email, depends on what you mean by email
July 31st, 2007 at 3:34 pm (9 months, 2 weeks ago) by Mimi Yin under Product DesignCourtesy of Philippe, this appeared on the Chandler Design mailing list a couple of weeks ago
Kids say e-mail is, like, soooo dead
Choice quotes:
“To hear the teen panelists tell it, that means e-mail will be strictly the domain of business dealings.”“All of the panelists said that they’re constantly looking for the next, new thing to stay current with friends; and they often use different social networks and tools to keep up with different sets of people.”
“It’s a problem for teens–you’re like losing out on some of your friends if you choose just one,” he said.”
It’s fuddy-duddy email versus hip and cool Facebook / MySpace, or MyFace to be fair and brief.
The most common response to the latest pronouncements of email’s demise is that well, sure, IM and MyFace are great for hanging out, but teenagers don’t “actually need to do anything”, do they? Wait until the brutal multi-tasking reality of adulthood hits them, then they’ll be doing crazy things like emailing themselves to keep it together. Oh and by the way, My Space sure is ugly.
I’d like to take a moment and back away from the epic battle that is brewing between social networking and email and try to understand what we mean when we say email.
If you clicked on the link above, you’ll have noticed that the definitions are pretty generic. They essentially boil down to: Communicating text messages between people using computers.
But really when we talk about email we mean much more than that. Email is an experience, more specifically, email an experience mediated by the software we use Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird. Gmail. Yahoo Mail. Hotmail…Pine.
What is unique about the email experience?
- Email can be both point to point or broadcast and everything in between.
- Email is asynchronous
- Email is discrete, though we often wish it were more discreet.
- However, individual email granules can link together and grow into discussion threads.
- Most important, email comes to you, you don’t go to it. In other words, email is centralizing mechanism, a way to build a communication hub around yourself.
These 5 simple qualities of email combine and re-combine to explain our relatively recent explosion in productivity and the birth of the information worker.
In inexperienced or careless hands, email can be easily misused and abused to the point of becoming an impediment to productivity, a facilitator of misunderstanding resulting in all-around bad feeling and flame wars.
In malicious hands, email is a downright nuisance.
In skillful hands, email can be worked and manipulated to achieve symphonic heights of well-moderated discussion, informed decision-making, seamless collaboration and and parallel processing.
The ease with which you can move between point to point and broadcast communications means for any given conversation thread, private side conversations can be had, announcements can be made, new people can be looped in, existing participants can drop out.
Asynchronous communication de-couples dependencies between individuals, freeing us all to move forward on multiple fronts, on our own time.
Discrete messages means that email can be managed and processed as individual tasks, messages, appointments, etc. Discrete messages also means that email is easily archived and categorized for retrieval.
At the same time, email threads, organized around topics pave a natural pathway for follow-up, discussion and progression forward.
Centralization means that the Inbox has become the ’source of truth’ for people as far as what they need to know, what they need to keep on top of, what they need to follow up on, what they need to do.
Try that with IM or MyFace. For extra spellcheck fun, SMS it all the way.
If this is what we all understand as email, email is never going to die. Email has become a way of work and life for people. Email may die as a means of social interaction, please send all jokes, obscene pictures, youtube links and spontaneous outbursts via SMS or MyFace. I’m not so attached to existing email protocols or existing email information models. But the essential character of email as expressed above, as a way to “actually get things done…together” has only begun it’s trajectory towards predominance as the paradigm for how we make progress through work and life.
To spell it out, this is the vision of email we’ve been banking on for Chandler.
As enamored as I am with email, I am not making a Luddite’s case for rejecting newfangled modes of communication. My belief is that the text message and MyFace phenomenon serve different functions than email and are addenda to the ever-growing spectrum of internet-enabled social interactions. And I don’t believe that the divide between MyFace and email is teen / hangout, aka fun versus adult / business, aka boring.
There is a place for MyFace in the ‘business’ context, whatever that may mean and there is also a clear path for the web-facing side of Chandler Project to grow into an instantiation of MyFace in the ‘actually getting things done, together’ context. Follow-up blog post to come on that topic…
