Finally, The Internet As Intended.

This morning I ran across JP Rangaswami’s post about email’s declining usefulness for the M generation.

3 reasons why email is past its useful life:

1. E-mail is now snail-mail, with all its consequences. A chore to do; formal and structured with letterheads and signatures and logos and all that jazz; a few important letters hidden in the midst of a pile of junk; usually filled with secondary spam as well, attachments and advertisements and whatever else people want to put into your e-mail envelope; hard to file, hard to find, rarely providing the context necessary to comprehend it and act on it; yet still part of our communications process, but far less so for Generation M. And people read e-mail like they read snail-mail. If you haven’t got their attention in the first few sentences, then it doesn’t get read. No longer fit for purpose, although it served many glorious purposes for many years.


2. Attempts to extend the breadth of e-mail by connecting everything else to a mail mindset will fail. Calendars and schedules; to-do-lists; reminders; alerts and subscriptions. RSS readers. Whatever. Over the last ten years we have seen the mailbox morph into something that has become a catchall for all this, and this was natural. For us. Not for Generation M. We are used to getting reminder letters from dentists and doctors and what-have you in snail mail, and we have faithfully reproduced all this in e-mail. Wrong. Paving cowpaths.


3. Like snail-mail, e-mail will not die. It will just gently become the electronic equivalent of snail-mail. Just look at what’s happening: 


• (a) your e-mail address just became your phone number anyway, as telephony became software


• (b) there are better tools for point-to-point communications, especially with time-sensitive information; so people will use IM and texting for these


• (c) where a richer dialogue (multilogue?) is called for, blogs and wikis and IM, social software in general, allow you to connect the conversation with the context. Like putting notes and comments on a flickr photo, or participating in a multipartite IM “channel”. As a result of this connect between conversation and context, it is easier to multitask, context-switching is cheaper and more reliable

Ultimately, we are talking about a person’s preferred method of contact - how do I like others to get my attention? Information exchanges are moving to diverse new mediums, and these new methods of exchange offer more context than email does. But we’re definitely still in beta. Where is the ulitmate context? When can I get all my attention information from one stream and in context - who will unify my messaging across SMS, social networks, my comment stream, my bookmarks inbox, IM, email, my VOIP phone, and maybe even my digitized snail mail? I don’t know. But I think that even generation M will tire of bouncing from social network to social network to check their inbox :-).