What Would a Post-Email World Look Like? 314
jfruh writes "Pundits have been gleefully predicting the death of email for years, but nobody has really been able to explain what will replace email, especially for the medium's archiving capabilities that businesses and governments have come to rely on. It's possible that email won't vanish, but rather become invisible, one component of an integrated communication stream that will be transparent to users but still present — and useful — under the hood. It may turn out that Google's Wave, which was built on this idea, was just a bit ahead of its time."
Natural progressions (Score:5, Interesting)
E-mail will replace regular mail. It's been a slow process, but the Post Office (in the US and Britain; I can't speak for other countries) is starting to cut back; The majority of what is being sent out are physical goods and junk mail (advertising). Many people here have switched to online bill pay, and most banks offer automatic payment if the company (rarely) doesn't do bill to credit card.
Party lines gave way to single user land lines, and single user landlines gave way to cell phones. Cell phones are now giving way to text-based near realtime communication like text messages. And cell phones will eventually transition to packet-switched radio communications using VoIP and QoS.
The only thing slowing down these technologies are companies that don't want to lose the massive profits they're getting from already deployed infrastructure; They employ a wide variety of legal and financial methods to ensure that competing/replacing technology as slowly as possible.
What's email? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't email directly anymore, I post on G+, recipients receive it in whatever means they favor, email, text notice, online, G+ account, whatever. If they don't have a google account, it goes to their email.
So yeah, email has become transparent to me. I receive next to no correspondence through it.
That is the beauty of improved technology, making my life easier. It's been so horrible since we've moved away from landline phones and two standard methods of contact became mail/phone/fax/mobile/voicemail/SMS/email/web contact form/Twitter and who knows through which of those you'd get a response.
I'm glad to return to the one stop shop.
Re:If my work inbox is any indication... (Score:5, Interesting)
My email has been 'a conversation' since the I first used it in the early 90's. Maybe with some of the more crippled web based services people are now suffering with it's not so obvious. Stuff like Gmail feels like a step back from the threaded clients I've used for all that time, too much missing or poorly implemented.
When people ask whether email is going away I'm completely dumbfounded. It ain't broke and IMHO works better than the alternatives where absolute, instant response isn't needed. Mostly it's not noticeably slower anyway. When I desperately need a little more speed IM does a good imitation of a very poorly featured email exchange.
I'm still waiting for FAXes to die (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm also less likely to say something I'll regret later and there is a record. In my opinion there will always be room for that type of communication.
Younger people seem to prefer texting or Skype because communication is more real-time and it's easier to include more people. It also allows them to be braver than they would be over the phone. This is not always good.
Re:If my work inbox is any indication... (Score:5, Interesting)
- Email sucks as an archive. It's fine to store personal emails just for yourself, but when you dig deep and assess how much critical corporate knowledge is locked away in this multitude of personal archives of all employees, you'll be in for a shock. A Twitter-like chat system for corporations (like Yammer) will retain that knowledge for the right group, including its future members. I find that only a small part of my conversation is actually really private between me and someone else. Most of it will be relevant for my team, for another team, for a special interest group within the company, or for the company as a whole. In a corporate Twitter, asking for knowledge is automatically the same as sharing it, as soon as an answer is given. In email, any answer is lost for everyone but yourself.
- Email is fine for communicating 1 to 1 or 1 to many, but it is a poor vehicle for many-to-many conversations. Chat systems (again citing Yammer as an example... by the way I have nothing to do with Yammer except that my current client uses it) can solve this by having private, ad-hoc chat groups in which participants can be invited or drop out as needed. New joiners will see a clear, linear history of what has already been discussed, instead of a steaming pile of replies-to-replies-to-replies in multiple sub-threads, all intertwined in a single email exchange.
In our team, we've tried sticking to the rule that forbids the use of email for anything that will still be relevant one week from the day of sending. The idea is that any such messages belong to the corporate memory, which means email is out as a vehicle for storing it. Instead, people use Yammer or email links to documents stored in a central repository. It worked out quite well, both improving recall from our corporate memory, keeping everyone on the same page and aware of each others' work, and improving the quality of discussions by electronic means.
But we too found that it is extremely hard to break the email habit. One thing that email still has going for it in the corporation is that everyone has it, and everyone is expected to read it several times a day. You might get told of for missing an important email, but being told off for missing an important discussion on some social media thingy? We're not quite there yet.
Re:That's funny (Score:4, Interesting)
My thoughts, exactly. There might be a different PROTOCOL, but there will ALWAYS be email. I contact my friends via email (because not everything is appropriate for IM or TXT), every website requires it for validation and registration. And, most importantly, I go through hundreds (500-ish) of emails a day at work just for our engineering/dev aliases and dealing directly with our clients. Quite simply, without email, I wouldn't remain in contact with all the people I have where they're good friends, but not people I talk to every week or even every month. And what we do for a living would absolutely not work.
Re:Video mail will replace email. (Score:2, Interesting)
That's retarded. I work for a company that has a massive deployment (not to mention, development investment) in tele-presence. Even we don't use it. We communicate by IM and email and we conduct our meetings not with telepresence but by email. And I certainly don't help our clients via "videomail". I communicate with them via email (or phone on occasion) as per their preference.
People already have video on any smart phone, too. Nobody uses it.
Maybe something will replace email for CHILDREN between the ages of 10 and 15 or 20, but everyone after that will still use email, because it's a necessary system for communication that nothing else can provide or accomplish. People who have some stupid fetish to abandon it are just fucking morons.
Re:That's funny (Score:5, Interesting)
It's funny how the fax machine just refuses to die to dignity. My sister-in-law works as a liason between group insurers and a major hospital in Wisconsin, and she faxes shit daily. Comes in handy whenever we need to fax something in our personal lives, which is about once every 3 years.
I was under the impression that medical records were going electronic, but she tells me she still generates at least a ream of paper a week, and she works alongside hundreds of people. I can't even imagine what they were using before...
Links to Wave-related information (Score:2, Interesting)
I replied to a couple people but thought this worth posting directly:
What was originally known as Google Wave is really a "federated" system just like email - anyone can run a server, and communications between entities go from client to their server to the 3rd party server to the end client, just like email. The difference is it happens in near-real-time with far less latency than email, including the ability to work "live" with someone else collaboratively on a single document, seeing what each other types character-by-character and where they move their cursor - I've done this with 4 other people all working on one document, it is awesomely effective. Waves can be non-realtime email-like conversations, or nearly-real-time-but-still-hidden-until-you-hit-send like IM or fully-near-real-time like webex style screen sharing. Wave has the ability to integrate with, and thereby eventually replace, email, IM, corporate wiki, and many other services in an ever expanding web as is only possible with a non-centrally-controlled solution. Facebook, Microsoft, and even Google cannot kill off all other forms of communications in the way Wave has the potential to do.
Wave is still alive and being "incubated" by the Apache Foundation (you know, the web server people), more info here:
http://incubator.apache.org/wave/
Specific activity on the project can be seen in the mailing list and code commit 'archives' here:
http://incubator.apache.org/wave/mailing-lists.html
Related, some of the community developers are hosting Wave servers for you to use freely for yourself and even your company (if you don't mind using a hosted service on a "bleeding edge" development server), such as this one here:
http://waveinabox.net/