Email is Broken
Well, it isn’t. But we’ve stretched this handy little tool a bit further than it was ever supposed to go. Think about some of the most successful Web 2.0 businesses in the context of broken email and a connection starts to form.
Ed Yourdon visited eight Bay area Web 2.0 companies last week and drew together some of the recurring themes in a post yesterday. Top of the list was broken email:
Email is broken — not in the sense that Salon magazine and various blog posters … complained in 2003, when it appeared that we were being completely overwhelmed with spam, but in the sense that it doesn’t adequately support our day-to-day business and workflow needs. More on that tomorrow.
I’m not sure what Ed’s going to post on the subject, but the idea got me thinking, and he’s definitely on to something. In fact, I don’t think it’s just about work: some of our favourite social uses of email are irredeemably bust.
Here are six things that we try to do, but don’t work well enough on email:
Cool links I send cool links to my friends on email. Quite often they send them to me. But what do you do when you want cool links but your friends are busy doing proper work? Probably you go to digg or reddit. And more convenient than sending those cool links on email might be the for: tag in del.icio.us - they get all those tasty links in one place on their browser and can save them up for a lazy afternoon at the end of the week. (Thanks, Jesse)
Sharing pictures. Ever tried emailing your group of ten friends the pictures from that party you went to the other night? It’s something you won’t do more than once. It’s something you’ll never do once you’ve got a flickr account. The same thing goes treble for video files. Stick it on YouTube, for goodness’ sake. Same thing goes for sending and receiving any large files. There has to be a better alternative.
Group discussion Send a message by email to a group of people expecting feedback and chaos quickly ensues. Some people will respond copying in the rest of the group. Some people will forget. Some people will talk about one aspect and others will talk about other aspects. What about if all those people worked in a social network that specialised in group communications? Wouldn’t that be better? Or if it’s a big issue, maybe even set up a special page that anyone can add to?
Dave commented to me on an earlier post that a key defining feature of Web 2.0 applications is many-to-many communications. I’m still not sure it covers everything we mean by the term, but it’s a helpful tool for each of these first three examples.
Organising events We agree to meet at a certain time and place. That takes about four emails, right? Now both of us have to copy that information out of our email and stick it into our calendars. Hardly a foolproof method. Probably we email again a couple of times the day before in order to double-check. Then I have to find the place because you didn’t send a map. Wouldn’t it be handy if we used something like skobee or eventsites instead?
Newsletters Typically, these contain the updates to websites, normally presented as a summary and a link. So I go to my email program, download your newsletter, skim through for the bits I’m interested in. So then I click the link, which may require me to activate the links in Outlook. Then it starts my web browser which may or may not correctly interpret the link. Now, what if we had a website that would automatically collate all those updates and let me skim through them in the same application that I’m going to look at the sites with? Oh, and it contains no spam. Something like Bloglines, perhaps.
Sorting and Finding Yes, we set up rules and filters and folders, but when you get more than a 100 emails a day, most of your rules become about identifying the messages you have to deal with NOW. Finding the press release you were sent four weeks ago by ermm.. someone about err.. some new product becomes a nightmare. Hang on. What if a really successful internet search engine produced its own email that was fast and effective to search?
Because email works so well at some things - personal communications, work exchanges - we’ve tended to try to use it for everything. Historically, there’s been no alternative in a lot of these cases. Email is still pretty good at some things but it’s not so good at others. The sites that have acted early and effectively on the opportunities I’ve listed here will all, I think, continue to be successful. They’ve found something that’s broken and frustrating and applied a fix.
