What Trumps Email?

Eventually every technology is trumped by something new and better. And I feel that email is ready to be trumped. But by what?

We all know the limitations of email. It has no native permissioning system so its susceptible to spam and near-spam. Email has become a burden to so many people that more and more are seeking an alternative.

And there are no shortage of alternatives; text messaging, instant messaging, and site messaging for one to one messaging. And blogging, twitttering, and social networking for one to many messaging.

I have heard from readers that email is considered 'serious messaging' and worthy of a reply before less serious activities like blogging, twittering, and social networking.

I reject that notion because I cannot reply to every email I get but I can alert whomever is interested via a blog post or twitter message that I'll be in San Jose for the next two days. That's going to lead to four or five impromptu meetings, several of which are with people who have found it impossible to reach me via email.

I find myself text messaging more and more every day. It has replaced email as the dominant form of communication in my family. We all carry phones with us and texting gets an immediate or near immediate response while an email sits in my daughter's AOL account along with dozens of spam emails she has no desire to wade through.

I've said it before on this blog. Spam has ruined email for the youth generation. They may adopt email at some point when they reach the workforce, but it will never be the messaging system of choice for them.

Site messaging (particularly in social networks) is incredibly popular among the younger crowd. The permissioning system is their social network and so they value the messages they get. They've been filtered. There's no porn spam on facebook.

Instant messaging remains a popular option and at times its useful. But real time communication has its limits. It demands your attention and I think anything that demands permanent attention is suboptimal in this technology driven partial attention world we live in.

Blogging is a lot like social networking but without the permissioning filter of the social network. It's useful and as many readers have found, one of the best ways to reach me is via a well articulated comment on this blog. Those rarely go unanswered. Funny enough the messaging system I prefer for those replies is email.

Email still has some big advantages. It does not demand real time attention. You can embed attachments and rich graphics in email. You can write long messages (although I would argue the 140 charachter limit of texting is an advantage as much as a disadvantage).

Maybe no single technology trumps email. Maybe its a collection of technolgies like texting, site messaging, and twittering that together provide a better alternative.

Will our lives be better without email? Hard to say. My life is so much richer because I can 'touch' hundreds of people a day via internet messaging (ie email). But it's also a burden. No pain, no gain I suppose. But I am sure hoping whatever trumps email allows me to touch even more people with less pain. And I see hopeful signs that might just be happening.

Comments

[Kendal H]

Blackberry messenger has taken over email for any contacts I have with blackberry's and their PIN

[Chris Rako]

As a member of the millennial generation, I have to disagree with you on this one. First, social site messaging has its fair share of spam. I receive nearly as many via facebook and myspace as I do on gmail. Unlike gmail, facebook and myspace have no mechanism to catch the spam. In addition, every time that I receive a message on myspace or facebook, I receive an email that lets me know, along with a link to read it. As currently designed, these systems are fundamentally dependent on email! Of course, they don't imbed the message in the email, you must logon, go to your inbox, open, blah blah blah...too much work. I would have preferred that my friend just sent me an email.

[carl rahn griffith]

it's the $64m question, fred, for sure - and whoever cracks it will certainly have the next killer-app.

at present there are - as you rightly point out - several disparate and viable alternatives, but none individually offer all the features one needs; and open apps integration (with even web2.0, such as it is) is, ironically, still too hard/clumsy - witness recent "facebook as an o/s" issues ...

i've worked long and hard on a business plan seeking to address this whole topic (and related areas) but mindshare buy-in has been hard, to say the least. hence i am engaged in 'proper' IT-software work, currently(!).

i am not going to share too much here (for obvious reasons!) but an amalgam of social networking, tagging, RSS and IM principles (and most importantly with innovative UIs), will i believe dramatically contribute towards the demise of email (as we know it).

i actually find the cranking-up of outlook each day to be quite a depressing prospect.

[Scott Yates]

In my first company, MyTrafficNews, we delivered traffic by e-mail, and on the web.

I learned during that time that people were much more emotionally connected to their inbox then to a webpage. It doesn't make much sense, it's all just light on a screen, but people hate e-mail spam because it's in "their" space, but tolerate obnoxious ads on web pages because they don't own that space.

Like you, I'm not sure exactly what's going on, but with an emotional attachment like that the e-mail inbox is not going away anytime soon.

[Charlie Crystle]

Email is about a technology, currently, when it should be about what we want. Drop the technical requirements of email and describe what we want, then build new technical requirements to deliver that.

I've been thinking about this a bunch, because our email only reaches a percentage of our customers, and we need them all to get the message. So we do things around the usage of the software, but that requires them to be using the software, so the communication is not based on their ability.

There's a better way. I suspect it involves RSS or using the IM interface and categorizing the message as "not real time" so no immediate engagement is required. It's likely the solution is less about technology and more about methodology...

[wesley]

I find it fascinating that voice doesn't even warrant inclusion. Not that I disagree but am amazed at what's happened in the past 10 years. A decade ago mobile phone costs were dropping so fast that everyone was projected to soon have them, and this turned out to be correct. But along the way instead of them becoming tools to talk they are increasingly being used as access points for messaging.

[W.B. McNamara]

I'd actually combine this post with your earlier What If You Aren't (yet) My Friend item -- they feel to me like to views into the same basic issue.

Social software, both explicit forms (facebook) and implicit forms (email counts in my book, as do IM and twitter), are about mediating human relationships in a way that benefits everyone involved.

With facebook as it is now, the definition of "social group" appears to be too limiting: you don't have a way to make this (world-readable on the regular Internet) blog world-readable within the facebook universe...people without a facebook-mediated relationship to you get nothing. That's going to have to change. Facebook has been doing some interesting stuff recently, but this feels like a potentially killer liability.

(I also find it incredibly bizarre that I can learn more about the facebook version of Fred Wilson when I'm *not* logged in (0 photos, 2 wall posts, 683 notes) than I can when I'm logged in (MIT alum, '83). Once I've logged in, facebook "knows" that I don't have a relationship with Fred, so I apparently lose the benefit of some sort of doubt.)

On the email front, I'm much less inclined to believe that it's going away, but I do absolutely believe that we're starting to return to the question of "what's it for?"

Email, IM, Twitter, blogs, content/comment/rate community sites, social networking sites, wikis, good old-fashioned messageboards; they're all "social" in varying ways, and a big part of what's happening now is people figuring out how these tools fit into, and change, their existing social structure.

You brought up an excellent point with attention demands: text messages won't replace email, because then they will have *become* email, with all the same liabilities. If it's going to be valuable (and I think it is) social software in all its forms will increasingly focus on helping us *route* communications and information, both incoming and outgoing, in a low-friction way.

[Tony Alva]

I really see no difference in texting and e-mail. I think kids text more because most don't carry email friendly devices. Once they join the work force, they will migrate to e-mail. Email is far less limiting and can be archived, attached to, time managed, etc... I think it is the superior format.

I think your email problems are related to the fact that you are a very public and connected guy. Your business, social, and family circles have thousands upon thousands of folks in it. While there are many others like you, most do not have this huge of a network. My hunch is there's no technology that will be able to solve your problem without some type of uncomfortable, alienating, and impersonal approach. If you can't get to all your email, you won't be able to get to all your text messages. Someone will not get a response eventually.

I get a crap load of e-mail (but very little spam) and its is sometimes cumbersome to read and respond to it all, but between my desktop, laptop, and mobiles devices I can get to it all without too much of an impact to my other life at all.

Face it brother, you’re a popular guy. Unless you want an admin or some other delegate responding to your incoming messages, filtering is going to be a fact in your life.

Just don't filter me out:-)

[Robert Dewey]

Right on, Fred.

One side project I've been working on (the social map project) has taken over most of my time. If you are able to recall, I had an idea about a wanted ads service, but was dropped due to unfavorable response and the lead developer taking a hike.

Most social networks have a "closed-open" messaging system. They are closed in the fact that they are not interchangeable with standard protocols (i.e. e-mail and SMS), but are open to allowing ANY registered user to send you a message.

Current communication methods already create our network. This includes e-mail, SMS, IM, or even commenting on blogs. Stitch it all together, and it becomes a multi-degreed social grid.

Tim O'Reilly has said it before, and I'll say it again. Your network is all around you. It's not locked into Facebook, nor is it locked into MySpace. Your communication defines your network. We've only exchanged e-mail a few times, that means we are weakly connected... However, I call my friend 4 times a day on my cellular phone - that's a pretty strong connection. Most services are wrong when they assume all connections are either mutual, or non-existent. They don't take into consideration the strength of the connection... If they did, we'd all see what few friends we have :)

[Frank San Miguel]

You've forgotten to mention wiki as a replacement for email. In my company, we use the wiki to replace a huge chunk of email communications. For instance, I rarely send documents and spreadsheets for review; we review and edit procedures online; we create and revise all sorts of technical and business documents online; the business plan is not a word document; the executive summary is not a powerpoint. The wiki supports RSS so I can even subscribe to important sections of the wiki to be notified of changes.

These days, my inbox is much less crowded than it was three years ago. Internal communications among employees go in this order:
1. IM
2. Skype
3. wiki
4. email
5. phone

Note that our use of IM is a lot like text messaging. We don't expect our corespondent to drop whatever they are doing - they will IM back when the can.

External communications with customers is more traditional:
1. email
2. phone

I foresee a day when I will be able to communicate with my customers the same way I do internally.

[Dave!]

I think IM is indispensable, for many of the reasons you've stated. I use instant messaging for a great deal of conversational communication during the day.

That said, sometimes I want to write a letter. Longer form communication does not lend itseld to IM; some types of communication need drafting and correction. Or there is just too much to be said to do it a few lines at a time. Or schedules don't match up because of time zones. Or whatever.

I think IM is undoubtedly here to stay and a very important messaging tool. But I think there will always be a place for e-mail, too.

[David]

It makes sense that the first implementation of internet communication would be epistletory. It's the easiest to translate to an existing technology (letters). But chatting, twitter, blogs, and workflow applications are all other aspects of the core product: written communication.

I think that workflow integration is only minimally implemented. You might get a calendar with your email. You might get a 'conversation' in Gmail. But there is so much more missing. What happens with branches of conversations? How about storing the important attachments or subsections of email in more interesting ways. And that brings up a huge gripe: where is the organization via attributes? Not just keywords, either. I want to say, "Show me all emails, subsections of emails, and attachments where topic is 'mortgage', priority = 1, and due date is end of the month. Show me all information in my chat history, calendar, hard drive, etc. that fit that as well."

I want an application that can be on-line and off-line, that can help organize my world and all of the written communications in it.

[P-Air]

Replacing e-mail makes it sound like it's all bad. My Blackberry e-mail gets less than 1% spam and Gmail has gotten much better as well. Certainly there are things that could benefit fm other communication mediums, but just like the phone didn't go away because it has its place in the landscape, e-mail shouldn't go away either.

Like Chris Rako above, my millenial cousins use e-mail equal to their use of messaging (SMS & IM), and use social network messaging (which is indeed suboptimal) much less. While e-mail doesn't always make a good generic broadcast medium for marketers, it works fine to your friends since they see who is sending the note and generally open it (at least my friends seem to ;) I get all Evites intended for me. I get all of my friends' distributions to groups I am a part of. This is great flexibility. What ever may come next, like Twitter, will fill gaps that were poorly served by e-mail, but I doubt it will fully replace it.

[Irvin Sha]

I think you're partially right. In the future, we will probably communicate via a collection of technologies. But I'm pretty sure that e-mail will be one of them, along with traditional phone calls, text messaging, and all that jazz.

I think that what's going to happen is a continuation of a current trend - different services will increasingly be used for highly specialized forms of communication that fit different needs. To clarify, these services have been dividing themselves up along a few axes - voice vs. text, one-way (sort of) vs. two-way, message length, assumed timeliness of response, number of recipients, etc. As user adoption increases, we'll start using the different services as tools that can be used interchangeably, depending on our current communicative needs.

This is already happening now. For example, text messages are a two-way channel with limited message length and assume a high level of responsiveness (although not quite as high as an actual phone call). Twitter is similar, but it's a one-way channel, assumes virtually no response at all, and can be blasted to a huge number of recipients. They each serve very different needs - you wouldn't try to remind your wife to pick up the kids via Twitter anymore than you would want to use text messaging to tell *all* of your friends that you're hanging out at Central Park.

The "axes" could certainly be refined, and will almost certainly change with technological development (e.g. blackberries have changed everyone's assumptions about a person's accessibility via e-mail). There's probably an unspoken social etiquette component out there that needs to be addressed. All the same, I think this is a valuable way of thinking about the evolving landscape of communications.

That being said, I think that e-mail is going to evolve - it's not going to go away. It is a perfect fit for a set of communicative needs and will thus have to stay in the game. The current problem that it's facing is a volume problem, and all of the other two-way communication mediums will eventually run into that same problem as they gain acceptance. This is a surface problem, and is not a fundamental defect of e-mail as a form. If anything, it just calls for more advanced filtering services (much like Caller ID or a good receptionist).

My guess is that social networks will serve as one of multiple filtration layers that go on top of e-mail and other services, rather than functioning as an entirely separate channel in and of itself. I'd also be surprised if someone didn't start gathering data on the types of messages that the user reads most frequently (a la Google Reader's trends) and then put together a predictive "flagging" feature that would tell the user that they should probably read certain messages first.

But I certainly don't see e-mail going away, anymore than I think that phone calls will go away. It serves too great of a purpose.

[Robert Dewey]

David,

Very interesting thoughts. I've thought a lot about e-mail tagging... Google has this, but it stays within your own account. If I tag an e-mail and send it, the tags don't follow it.

I think the next communication platform will need to integrate several forms of communication. When I get an e-mail, perhaps notify me via SMS and give me a preview and show the tags associated with that message.

There is real value in analyzing user relationships. The next step in such a situation would be associating content with specific users. For example, Google Calendar and 30 Boxes could ping the grid with user calendar information. I would then be able to see the schedules of my friends, regardless of their service...

Need another example? Invite services could also connect and read your social network, as defined by communication. Invite everyone in your "family" group, or maybe your "basketball friends" group. The service you're using (Evite, MyPunchBowl, etc) doesn't matter - it all pings the same server.

How about searching through your friends to find Craigslist listings? Or bookmarks? A lot of people use services like Delicious, but is it easy to cross search everyone in my network? Nope.

The is what I thought of when I first heard about the open Facebook system... but I was sorely disappointed.

[Matt]

I see it as more as a building a better, smarter email interaction solution. I'd like to say goodbye to mimicking snail mail with inboxes, folders, etc.

An email is a simply a message with certain attributes. I'd like to see all of my email coming into one central personal data warehouse, attachments and all.

Tools would be used to sit on top and utilize the metadata and attachment combinations associated with the emails so the end user can mine, consume, and interact with their messages (and attached media) depending on the task at hand.

[RBA]

15 years ago people played chess via email. Today nobody does. Why? Because there are better ways to do it (games that connect to the Internet to fetch the other player's moves, draw in our screen a pretty and colorful board in realtime, etc)..

Same thing for many other things. As a new tool comes up that allows us to do better what we used to do via email, we won't use email for that anymore. But as long as there are things for which there's no substitute, email will stick around. For me it's as simple as that. What do you think?

[Matt]

Hey Fred,

I feel there are two options: reduce the number of emails you care about, and get through the emails you care about faster. Xobni is working on both.

[rob]

the future of email is clearly not some new thing or new configuration, it is instead a reversion to the phone and to other interpersonal modes of conversation.. like talking f2f. the more crap experimentation we do with every nuance of the continuum between asynchronous and synchronous, busy with the twitter of valley drones and vc's, the more we all realize that it's real one on one attention giving and getting conversation that we've engineered against that is more important. the blackberry is not and well not even be a mass-market product. whats rich is whats past.

[Jon Williams]

Fred,
Email is ubiquitous because it's simple (just has the Internet is with http/HTML). Ironically, this same simplicity is what enables spam.

What I hate most about email is that it's transient. For instance, this post and my comment will get indexed by google and available in the future, whereas email is not. I am an avid email filer, but I am the only person who can benefit from this filing. I would love to see a replacement for "sharable" email, especially in corporations, as this would be a fantastic basis for corporate knowledge base.

[Simon]

Hi Fred,

I agree with you. I have run a bootstrapped widget company for just over a year now. Our alpha product was a real time chat widget. In concept this seemed like a great idea. We built it and managed to get it on approx 10,000 sites without really marketing i very much. However, our user research (with our savvy user base) has confirmed our new direction which supports your thinking on this subject. Email is ubiquitous technology and we've learned that it can be far more ubiquitous by niching it. Our very slick example of this will be launching in about a month at Pladeo.com - please look out for it!

[Jack Phelps]

We can certainly afford to lose SMTP; I don't think too many people communicate so binary-ly anymore, and chat can be asynchronous if we want it to be. But announcements (blogging, twittering, whatever) are very different from personal communications. SMS certainly isn't lost on the younger generations like you suggest e-mail is.

I expect a more universal person-to-person messaging protocol would be optimal; one which aggregates all the messages you send between two people or as a given group and presents them as a conversation that appears the same whether it's real-time or asynchronous. Blitz, anyone?

But we may not even need a protocol; Google is certainly doing this with chat and e-mail and may integrate SMS with its phone whenever it hits. So it's clear that although a protocol might help, companies are certainly willing to step up individually and perform behind-the-scenes work to offer a more dynamic user experience than protocols can.

[Gustaf Alstromer]

interesting post Fred,

it's easier to talk about this if you are not looking at the labels but rather the way the different messaging formats are actually used.

the general trend seems to be that we are heading toward messaging with a really low barrier of entry(no pressure of a formalized tone).

they way people first wrote email where the way they used to write letter, but the hotmail-generation changed that for good. short messages sent back and forth in an informal manner. google picked up on that with making gmail in conversation mode and integrating IM, a first step towards unified messaging.

texting/SMS has always had a ton of constraints and i would argue that we need a gmail for SMS, a re-invented interface that sucks less that most of the current one. conversation view and presence are two obvious ways. on iphone ichat(im) is the interface for SMS, that's a great step forward but still only half way.

(phone numbers as unique identifiers simply feels ancient but that's another discussion.)

twitter is doing great because it's broadcast messaging with a really low barrier of entry, as is tumblr.com

i'm pretty sure presence will be integrated in most messaging systems in the next couple of years. gmail is poineering in this space and more will follow, simply because it's useful and the infrastructure is becomgin available

- Gustaf