The End of Email

 

Recently I was at an excellent conference at CIGI ,in Waterloo Ontario, Canada. During these meetings there were presentations about various online platforms for group collaboration.   One presenter vowed that email is the killer app and that is why it needs to form the basis for any group discussion tool both today and 5 years from now.

 

For many years, I have been a strong advocate of email based collaboration.  At Bellanet, I helped to setup what we called web-to-email gateways to help those in low bandwidth environments have access to the web through simple email commands.  In fact it was through this project that I had the opportunity to exchange emails with Tim Berners Lee, who was at CERN.  There they had a project known as Agora, an open source project that provided such as a service.  I also helped to create something called dgroups which was based around a proprietary databased-powered email tool called Lyris.  

We simply mashed it up with the web using Cold Fusion to create a very early generation social networking tool  and years before Facebook, Myspace and so forth.   So I have always believed email indeed was the best base for group collaboration tools especially in developing country contexts.  This comment however, made me want to challenge my own assumptions about email.  Is it still true and will it still be true that email is the killer app in 5 years?

 

The email experience has changed

Although I still believe email is still universal, thanks to its open standard (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), first published as Internet Standard 10 (RFC 821) in 1982) and open source origins, it is becoming heavily polluted by being used for anything and everything.   I’m not just referring to the usual money scams or worse things, but the sheer volume of email professionals receive on a daily basis.  

People are becoming overloaded by the volume and in my opinion it is changing the efficiency of the workplace.   While some people are very good at managing email with filters, many are not.  Many people send an email that generates two more emails, that generates 4 more emails and so forth.  People are also spending more and more of their work days writing messages to the point where I’m hearing people tell me that they do not want to join a discussion that is based around email.  They simply can’t manage the email volume they have already.  Email baskets have become dumping grounds for all types of discussions and information sharing.

From one recent study – ref: from the carreers blog by John Hazard and John Sears reported a study where:

“Statistician Mario Hair and computer science professor Dr. Karen Renaud monitored 177 employees in order to find out how they deal with their never-ending deluges of emails at work and found that the sheer volume of email they receive caused one-third of respondents to feel stressed out, a feeling which is worsened by their feeling of obligation to respond to them quickly.

From there, the statistics got uglier: Workers were found to be viewing emails up to 40 times an hour. 28 percent said they felt “driven” when they checked messages because of the pressure to respond. More than a third checked email every fifteen minutes and 64 percent said that they checked email more than once an hour. Only 38 percent of workers were relaxed enough to wait a day or longer before replying to an email.”

One solution proposed is a Global Email Charter and better training for people in the workplace who use email.  To date there is almost no formal training on use strategies in the workplace.  There is also an emerging generational gap where younger people are now running from email as fast as they can, and instead sending messages within closed social networks like Facebook.   

The rise of the cell phone and txt messaging

Second mobile phones are by far the killer hardware especially for those living in developing countries.    Many people are now using their mobile phones to communicate by voice and through text messaging.   The ITU estimates that 43 Billion text messages were sent on New Years Eve 2007 globally alone.    

To give another example of the rise of txt versus email from a 2007 CNET article entitled: Email is sooo dead :

“Catherine Cook, the 17-year-old founder and president of MyYearbook.com, was the lone teen entrepreneur who said she still uses e-mail regularly to keep up with camp friends or business relationships. Still, that usage pales in comparison to her habit of text messaging. She said she sends a thousand text messages a month”

What’s Next?

Is email still very important?  Yes and it will continue to be important, but the times are changing.   There is a clear frustration with email as it is today and the next generation are not going to tolerate a tool thats causing increasing stress in the workplace.  They are already moving away from it to other means of communication.   Online group collaboration tool designers need to be aware of these trends as people evolve their means of communication to manage their lives and careers in an increasingly digital world.

Already tools like Friend feed and Facebook help people in ways that are in some cases more effective for monitoring their peers and friends activity streams, than sending emails back and forth. People clearly are looking for new means to manage the volume of traffic their networks of friends generate in a manner that is quick and digestible.  

Also notice that Twitter isn’t email, its twitter, its text going to a mobile phone, to the web, to any number of clients.  Its short, and its quick.  It is, I believe, part of the evolution of our mind-sets towards how we digest information and its relates very much to what McLuhan described in his McLuhan’s 1957 “Speed and Change” about the speed of information.

Email isn’t going away, but it has become the dumpster for all types of activities. People are leaving it to try new ways to communicate amongst a network of peers whom they have more control.  My belief is there needs to be a new open protocol or standard for sharing information amongst groups/networks that takes over where email left off, that puts the user back in charge and creates a more efficient way of working.  

In the mean time people will continue to try proprietary web 2.0 services that are trying to become the next defacto stardard for group communication and collaboration until new open standards and open source tools emerge.  This is starting to happen.  A few projects to watch are the DISO Project, DiSo (dee • soh) is an initiative to facilitate the creation of open, non-proprietary and interoperable building blocks for the decentralized social web, the Open Web Foundation, and Dataportability.