Is email in danger from microblogging?

I’ve claimed for sev­eral years now that email is bro­ken. At best, email is the low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor (LCD) for send­ing mes­sages to a spe­cific Inter­net user. Every ISP sub­scrip­tion comes with some kind of email account. Free web­mail addresses are easy to get. Many mobile phone accounts come with an email address. Alex Iskold’s post from Read­WriteWeb called Is Email in Dan­ger? dis­cusses how microblog­ging ser­vices like Twit­ter can over­come the inher­ent prob­lems of heavy­weight email clients like Microsoft Outlook.

Broad­cast­ing with a microblog

Microblog­ging ser­vices are best suited for broad­cast­ing mes­sages to lots of users. Friend­Feed, Twit­ter and sim­i­lar ser­vices are widely used by pop­u­lar blog­gers to pub­li­cize their lat­est posts and men­tion their daily activ­i­ties. Most of these ser­vices accept text mes­sages and offer mobile ver­sions of their web sites, so they are eas­ier to use than email from an ordi­nary mobile phone. iPhone and Black­Berry users have bet­ter email clients on their devices, but microblog­ging from these devices seems to work well. 

As I men­tioned yes­ter­day in my arti­cle called The bat­tle against Twit­ter spam, microblog­ging ser­vices like Twit­ter have their own prob­lems. Because email is a mis­sion crit­i­cal ser­vice, it’s almost always avail­able and work­ing. Col­lect­ing com­ments and posts from microblogs can be accom­plished with RSS — I use this to repost my Friend­Feed activ­ity to billso.com, but it would take a bit more effort to do this as part of an archiv­ing and com­pli­ance effort. 

I’ve never been a fan of Out­look. In its easly ver­sions (Out­look 97 and 98), the appli­ca­tion would crash at least once a day. Microsoft devel­oped  ActiveSync soft­ware to sup­port PDAs, but 10 years later it is still a mad­den­ing piece of cruft.  

Look out for Out­look and iTunes

My uni­ver­sity uses Microsoft Exchange as its faculty/staff email server, so I occa­sion­ally get meet­ing invi­ta­tions and Out­look forms in my Gmail my box. All of my uni­ver­sity email is auto-forwarded into my Gmail account. Microsoft meet­ing invi­ta­tions are use­less in Gmail — I have to tap out a reply to accept or decline the meeting.  

To be hon­est, Apple’s iTunes is fol­low­ing a sim­i­lar evo­lu­tion. It start as a music player, but has become a media store­front, disc burner and iPhone appli­ca­tion installer. I’d think that sev­eral spe­cific light­weight apps would work bet­ter than a huge, mono­lithic instance of iTunes. On a Mac, iTunes per­for­mance is barely tol­er­a­ble. iTunes on a Win­dows box is a lum­ber­ing behemoth. 

Gmail, on the other hand, was designed as a light­weight solu­tion that would work in a stan­dard web browser. I love Gmail because I can search for mes­sages quickly, and I know I won’t run out of stor­age room for old mes­sages. There’s no rea­son for me to delete an old mes­sage in Gmail. 

Attack­ing the inbox

One approach to man­ag­ing a bulging email inbox is to sit down and clear the queue. The Inbox Vic­tory web page tries to make this process fun by let­ting users post pic­tures of them­selves with their empty inboxes. I clear out my Gmali inboxes a few times a year. 

Luis Suarez of IBM claims that he reduced his incom­ing email by 80%, thanks to his usage of social net­work­ing tools like RSS feeds, Twit­ter and IBM’s inter­nal clone of Face­book, Bee­hive. Suarez dis­cussed his  arti­cle in the New York Times called I Freed Myself from E-Mail’s Grip.

Suarez admits that his job as a social com­put­ing evan­ge­list helped him cut his email vol­ume. He’s sup­posed to encour­age his fel­low IBM employ­ees and man­agers to use Bee­hive, which is as much a knowl­edge man­age­ment (KM) tool as it is a social intranet appli­ca­tion. IBMers are sup­posed to use Bee­hive to share events, lists, pic­tures, tips, and ideas across the enter­prise, as part of for­mal and ad hoc work­groups and project teams. 

Image cour­tesy of gwEN­vi­sion through a Cre­ative Com­mons license. 

Related arti­cles and pages on billso.com

• Email and spam
• iPhone
• 7 July 2008: The bat­tle against Twit­ter spam
• 22 April 2008: Email is still broken
• 10 June 2007: Just say “no” to HTML in email
• 19 April 2007: The great Black­berry blackout
• 22 August 2006: 95 per­cent of email is UCE
• 4 August 2004: E-mail is broken

Tagged as: Apple, email, friendfeed, gmail, IBM, intranet, iPhone, iTunes, Microsoft, network, social, storage, twitter, usability