Back on the Soapbox [Subject: Email]

I've been on a soapbox lately about email [I can tell my wife has just about had it with me].  Three recent events have me thinking about this ...

1. On the day of the denial of service attack on Twitter I happened to be in a meeting with David Armano who was giving a talk on Social Business Design.  David discussed [among other things] more dynamic ways to communicate other than email, and how when Twitter [and Facebook] went down that morning, his email inbox was unusually flooded [since people couldn't communicate with him through preferred channels].  While the inbox flood sounds like hell, the fact that he and his friends are using alternative communication channels is very encouraging.

2. I had dinner with a friend last week, and we got into a discussion on the red ! on emails. He is a lawyer [which makes no difference to this story] and claims to have never [not once, ever!] sent an email with a !.  He thinks it's the ultimate form of hubris that a ! - which takes no effort to make appear other than clicking a button - will somehow elevate your email to the top of his inbox.  He was passionate about this.  I was inspired.  I went back and scrolled through my sent folder over the last few weeks for all my emails marked ! ... sure enough very few [if any] of them deserved the !.  I decided at that moment that I will never send another email marked ! unless it somehow involves the physical well-being of me or my family.

3. A few days ago I read "A Manifesto for Slow Communications" by John Freeman in the Wall Street Journal.  It's the right thinking at the right time.  Read it.  Slowly. 

Email is great for memorializing thoughts, CYA and even distributing a message to a discreet group.  And I'm not naive ... I know [for now] this is currently how a lot of business gets done.

But if everything I need to share resides in the cloud [which to me is a simple way of saying my photos are on Flickr, docs on a server somewhere, thoughts on my blog, etc.] then what's the utility/relevancy of email? 

Sending email is inefficient when compared to other media ... have they changed addresses lately?; better make the subject line catchy to stand out in their inbox; check my grammar, it is a letter after all; etc.  Why bother when I can just Tweet [or Yammer, or update the Wiki, etc.] a link in seconds - without all the other noise that goes along with email.  Isn't that more efficient?

In 1996 I was mesmerized by email.  Every new message was exciting.  In 2009 email is more about inbox management than it is information exchange.  It's a labor.

I don't have the answers, but I'm certain a lot of clever people are working on it.  Thoughts?  Am I overly hysterical about this?

Comments

[Nick S.]

I could not agree more with #2. I have never sent an email with the red exclamation point, nor will I ever. If it's that important, call me or come find me. 9 out of 10 times, I prefer an interaction with an actual person anyway.

I'd love to get your thoughts on voice mails. I think listening to a voice mail takes too long and an email or text message saying, "please call me when you get a chance" works much better.

[Ian]

Not sure about sending an email to have someone call you. Seems like a disconnect. I agree long voicemails are annoying - how about "Hey it's Nick - call me to discuss deadlines on project XYZ."

[kai]

I'm with your friend: I've never sent one either. Curious practice, if you ask me.

Let me know if you have any questions.

[Juarez Genova]

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[twitter.com/maayanroman]

I've never sent a ! email either. I also hate it when people attach something to the email so that in outlook it gives me a pop-up telling me that they've requested a response of some sort to know that I opened the email. You'll know if I read it when I respond to you. If I don't respond to you then that means the email wasn't for me (I get CCed a lot).

While other communications platforms are great for different purposes email has some superior features. For one, sometimes you just want an attachment, not a link to a site where there's a link to download a file, just to make it easier on the recipient. Also the saving/searching/archiving features of services like gmail are thousands of times better than the horrible messaging service facebook offers. As for sending messages to multiple people (facebook can send 20 max) you could say twitter is the best, but what if you only want to send a message to a large but discreet population?

What you said about "have they changed addresses lately?; better make the subject line catchy to stand out in their inbox; check my grammar, it is a letter after all; etc" is true, but the problem there is not with email itself but with the mindset of people sending it. In short, email is super awesome. Then again I work in email marketing so maybe I'm a little biased.

[Jim Mitchem]

Excellent post Ian. Someone mentioned yesterday that email (in conceptual capacity) is 38 years old. While I don't know if it will ever 'go away' in our lifetimes (too many people cling tightly to it), you can see the concept shift in things like Twitter and now Wave. The idea of email is simple - connectivity. But it's so slow and cumbersome to manage. Better is coming. Maybe it's here?