Web Strategy by Jeremiah » Facebook to supplant email?

Web Strategy by Jeremiah » Facebook to supplant email?:

Aiden wonders if Facebook messages will replace email, maybe for certain demographics of heavy users, but not all.

Okay, here's the most recent "neat new technology is going to kill email" posting. This seems to be the modern version of the "death of the net predicted" meme. Last time we heard this, it was how RSS was going to replace email. Or maybe it was twitter. Or IM. Or...

well, you get my point.

Reality check: Email's not going away. God help us, some of us have actually tried to kill email (or more correctly, engineer a replacement protocol that fixes the problems with SMTP). There was even an IETF working group at one point looking at this. The end reality is that SMTP is so engrained in so many things that it's not even practical to look at re-engineering or replacing it. It's almost as if we went in and rebuilt the net at the TCP/IP level (and to some degree, with IPV6, they're trying, and look how long that's taking)

What people miss is that there are a lot of things email is pretty damn good at doing.

What supporters of email miss is that there are traditionally a whole lot of things email is pretty damn bad at doing, but we used it because it existed and there weren't many better options. To me, and this ties back closely to my geek past online, is the email list. Using email for most mailing lists is silly, because it's information that doesn't have to be timely, yet it's delivered in an interrupting basis -- so the first thing folks did after inventing the mailing list was start inventing ways to prevent email from annoying us -- whether it was the mailing list digest or client filters or even (god help us) subject line tags that let someone visually filter an email as unimportant to minimize the impact.

RSS is a key technology that kills mailing lists, because it now allows a user to define their access frequency to that data. As someone who's managed mail lists for a couple of decades, all I can say is -- it's an overdue improvement, too.

IM? Facebook? Twitter? all of those? They have the potential to take away another class of data traditionally sent via email, but which email isn't really good at: things that may or may not be important to the recipient, and may or may not be timely or relevant once the recipient actually sees them.

Emails core strength is in one to one, private communication. We built god knows how many one to many uses into email because, well, email's endemic and handy, but the bigger "many" is, the less useful email is to handle it. The more public a communication is, the less useful email is. Facebook and twitter and the like are taking over this part of the email content space, because they're you to communicate out to a selected group in a non-interrupting way.

None of this is killing email. What it's doing is allowing email to move back into the area where it works best. to some degree, I think these services are being created because people realize email isn't a good delivery mechanism, so they're inventing better ones for certain classes of information.

And this is a very good thing -- we're maturing out of the "I have this hammer, that must be a nail" mentality. But I don't think any of us are going to throw out our hammers any time soon. We're just buying a bigger toolbox to house all of the new tools, too.