Email is dead…

Or so the WSJ technology blog would have us believe.

Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.
In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate—in ways we can only begin to imagine.
We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts.

That really misses the mark, I think. There are a lot of reasons email is more useful for communication than the other technologies mentioned in the article (Twitter and Facebook specifically). Social networking sites are great for quick one offs, really fast questions and organizing get togethers. What they lack is history and permanence.
I have, at my fingertips, email archives going back to 2005. With a little bit of effort I could dig up archives from 1999. It’s history that isn’t as built into social networking. Twitter doesn’t keep more than a certain number of your tweets. I don’t even know if you can search Facebook walls for certain keywords and discussions. It’s the relative permanence of email that keeps users coming back to it.
A number of others have also commented on the WSJ article. FastCompany addresses the value of email and how well it fills its role in communication. They also point out a lot of things that you can’t do in other media that you can do easily in email.

  • You can’t embed a file directly in a Tweet.
  • Would you trust Facebook, with its odd history of rights control, with a corporate Excel file?
  • Legions of gray-surfers have adopted email as a way to keep in touch–they won’t be switching.
  • While email is usually formatted informally, it’s still more formal than social networking norms–important in a business setting.
  • Millions of BlackBerry and iPhone users will testify to mobile email’s convenience.

The Email Service Guide points out other significant differences between social networking and email.

Email is used to contact people other than our friends, to talk about more than what we did for the weekend, and to get real work done in a neutral setting. Facebook and Twitter mix our communication with more people and more play and while that is a fantastic and fun thing, it’s just not a substitute for email.

Long live email.

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Links for 9/2/09

People are still talking about the White House spamming. At Al Iverson’s Spam Resource there are two posts, one from Jaren Angerbauer titled Guest Post: Email and the White House and another from Al himself titled White House Spam, Signup Forgery, and GovDelivery. Both are insightful discussions of the spam that the White House has been sending. Over at ReturnPath, Stephanie Miller talks about how the publicity surrounding the spam is great PR for permission.
Stefan Pollard has an article at ClickZ looking at how an apology email in response to a recipient visible email mistake can actually make the fallout worse.
Web Ink Now documents one recipient’s experience with a bad, but all too common, subscription practice.
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Don’t forget to participate in the DKIM implementation survey. For ESPs. For ISPs. Check back next week for results.

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Links to check out

Things are going well, if busy, here at the conference. I am attending lots of sessions and continuing to edit my talk for tomorrow. I thought I would list some random links that have come up here recently.
Lashback is advertising a joint webinar with Habeas, Publishers Clearinghouse and Lashback on how to protect brands and increase revenues with reputation management.
Terry Zink explains the new Microsoft advertising campaign. There are actually quite a few Microsoft people here at the conference, including the brain behind SNDS. We ran into each other yesterday evening, his room is right next to mine.
Ken Magill has an ongoing series of articles investigating Email Appenders, and all their various incarnations. This is an example of the confused jumble of connections that some companies use in order to hide.
Speaking of companies with bad reputations, the NY Times reports on Intercage’s loss of hosting. Atrivo/Intercage are notorious amongst the folks who fight malware and bots and have been called the American version of the Russian Business Network.

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