Reports of email’s death not greatly exaggerated?
A few months ago Hawk Wings blogged a Business Week report that claimed
It turns out that Stowe Boyd predicted the death of email in the Summer of 2004 at the Supernova conference. He was hounded from the podium by cynical hecklers.
We shouldn’t mourn email’s passing, Boyd says:
It should be obvious that the only thing that email is well-suited for is things that look suspiciously like spam: broadcasting a static message to many, many people…
…So this will be the year when it becomes truly obvious — even to those dinosaurs who wanted to tar-and-feather me at Supernova — that email’s days are numbered. Not that it will disappear — surface mail and fax will linger on due to the long-tail of communication media — but it will clearly be a byway, and not the highway, for communication and collaboration.
Better start a blog about iChat.
Tags: blogging, email, instant messaging, web 2.0, wikiRelated posts
January 4th, 2006 at 5:32 am
Rubbish! Email is extremely valuable for communications that are meant to be private but require a longer format than possible on instant messaging. Not everyone is always at the desk to respond to instant messaging, nor wants their work disturbed by a constant flow of messages. In short, email is to instant messaging what the letter is to the telephone. Both have their place.
January 4th, 2006 at 7:07 am
Hmm… I dunno, I still find it useful for targeted, archivable communications with select individuals or groups.
However, taking business communication for example, I’ve seen my use of Basecamp replace most client email. Email is only an afterthought in this use case, used for notifying people of posts or comments.
I think RSS - in various forms - is going to have to make some more inroads into OS’s, tools and mindshare before email can begin to be supplanted. Chat in it’s current incarnation isn’t as useful as it could be.
January 4th, 2006 at 7:56 am
While email will never die, just like I still get mailed invoices, I have to agree that it’s not a big one on my list anymore. We use iChat company wide, and ask our clients to install an AIM, whether it be google or aol, and have it saved to auto archive our conversations. This way, we index it via spotlight, our questions are prompt; all the pluses of computer with out the lack of speed of email (isn’t it funny that’s it’s slow for us now).
Just like Allan, we use Basecamp for our business tracking, but iChat for more direct conversation, and inhouse dialog.
So email has it’s place, but it’s slowly dying out as my buddy list gets larger. Jabber and XML, icalendar and rss, will be our friends more so than ever.
January 5th, 2006 at 4:36 pm
I don’t get it. How else am I supposed to just send a note to someone? None of the so-called “replacements” does that. With IM, the other person has to be online at that very moment, and the expectation of a real-time conversation is created. And I have to give them my IM screen name, which I never do — only a few people at work, and about three of my closest friends, has that, and I don’t give it to anyone else because that only leads to constant interruptions all day and all night while trying to work. I tell people (customers, etc) that I don’t use IM at all rather than give that out. Though I’d be more willing if iChat could log in to two screen names at the same time, so I could only log into the more “public” one when I’m really willing to be disturbed and have all of my time occupied by “chatting”.
I haven’t seen anything that attempts to replace what email does. Certainly none of the listed things even tries to.