Why Email Can Sleep Soundly Tonight
By: admin
OK, OK, I didn’t manage to get this post up yesterday. We had a busy time proofing our excellent August issue. The irony of blogging taking second place to making the magazine is not lost on your humble editor.
Now let’s get back to the notion of social networks taking over the world, specifically, replacing email.
It’s natural, especially in a blog culture that, like journalism, values “new and improved” as much as any advertising slogan writer. Myopic visions of the future, and the belief that today’s “big thing” is tomorrow’s “game changer” are part and parcel of a 24/7 blog cycle. I wish more people would give these ideas some thought before jumping on these faddish trains of thought.
So now social networks like Facebook, Pownce and Twitter are supposed to be replacing email, just as they are supposedly undermining traffic in the blog world. I say bull puckey.
From where I sit, the elephant in the social networking room is that while folks feel quite comfortable predicting that networks will turn existing communication methods on their heads, they’re also whining about social network fatigue. Which is it guys? Do you love the synergy, interactivity and other buzzword compliant attributes of Facebook, or are you sick of fielding friend requests? Have you turned your email client off in favor of Twitter, or do you still need Outlook or Apple Mail to read corporate memos or links to forwarded YouTube videos? It’s way too early to draw any conclusions about how social networks in general will supplant email or anything else. We still don’t know which metaphor or technology will “win”.
I’m not a social network curmudgeon. If you read this blog,you know I’ve had a public infatuation with at least two social networks. And lately, I’ve been using them to communicate with people who write for this magazine, or whose stories I would like to tell you, our readers. My Facebook profile effectively answers the questions generated by so many cold emails “Who are you?” And that saves time. I’ve also been able to “put the word out” on Twitter in a couple of cases. That’s very cool, but highly dependent upon the people I need watching their Twitter stream, or surfing over to Facebook. I submit to you that many people are more likely to do these things today than they are in six months or a year.
Much more fundamentally, email works! Everyone knows how to use it. Filters make it possible to keep messages organized, threaded, flagged and (hopefully) spam-free. Email is available everywhere. Email is easy to use. Email does not depend on a friend request. In short, email isn’t broken in a way social networks can fix. I think I’ll hang onto my accounts for a little while longer.
July 16th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
Personally, I think that this sort of article will go down as a Lord Kelvinesque prediction about technology. Yes, email is not going to disappear tomorrow, but there is definitely some shift from email to social networking sites. Personally, non-work related messaging goes through facebook almost exclusively. I understand that a lot of this is because people in my geographic area uniformly use facebook; it’s very difficult to find someone in my age range that doesn’t. However, I don’t think the variety of different social networking applications that exist will hold back its use for messaging, at least not for long. The trend for emerging technologies as they become better established is towards amalgamation, not further division. I think the number of popular social networking sites will decline, there will be increased interconnectivity between different sites, and the number of users overall will continue to grow. Considering the variety of additional features that these sites offer over email (announcing events, persistent conversations, sharing media, etc), it’s difficult to see a reason why these users would continue with email. Additionally, as companies explore intra-office “social networking” systems, the workplace will move in the same direction as the social scene. As email sleeps it is being replaced.