7 Points on “The End of the Email Era”

"The End of the Email Era", a Wall Street Journal article by Jessica Vascellaro ignited, somewhat ironically, a flurry of "have you read this?" emails in my inbox. I'm a bit late to the party of dissecting Vascellaro's piece. All of last week, I was cranking on a new version of reMail. Yet I felt I'd write about it, since I feel pretty qualified to comment on email-related topics.

WSJ's 4 Points

In case you haven't read it, here are the points that the WSJ article makes:

1. IM is better than email because it gets you faster responses.


2. Twitter and Facebook updates are better than email because they're informal and fun.


3. All these updates will cause even more overload and filtering needs to improve.


4. Facebook gives you context about people's location, mood, and current activity. You need to coordinate less than if you were using only email.

Gabor's 7 Points

Most people misread the WSJ piece as "email is dying". But email isn't dying, it's being complemented by new modes of communication. And despite Paul Graham's warning about "lists of N things", here's my list of 7 things to contribute to the social network updates vs. email debate.

1. Twitter and Facebook updates are orthogonal to email. Looking through the last 200 tweets on my Twitter feed, I didn't find a single update that I would have sent as an email had Twitter not existed. The use cases are too different. Thus, Twitter is a parallel world to email.
   
   This HuffPo article puts it best:
   

   If you're like us, you still send text messages on the weekends, check voicemail at work, post photos to Facebook, watch viral videos on YouTube, and Tweet your favorite news.
   
   In other words, we haven't "killed off" our previous tools: we're actually adding, not abandoning, platforms. And when we do ditch, it's because of forces more complex than seasonal trends (or the news cycle).

   
   
2. Email is private, Twitter is public. Twitter and Facebook can't replace email because they're public or semi-public communications channels. Direct messages in Twitter and Facebook messages are bad, low-fidelity clones of email functionality. You shouldn't use them.


3. Your work email belongs to your employer. You can't use Facebook for work. The messages and the intellectual property you create while at work belong to your employer. If you leave the company, you shouldn't be able to take them with you.


4. Email is about task management. The reason why your inbox is a source of stress and your Twitter feed is not is because email is a task manager. Twitter and Facebook are entertainment. Your boss wouldn't assign a task to you via a Facebook update. But if your boss sends you an email, you better read it and get that work item done.


5. The unread messages counter. Unlike Twitter, email has an unread message counter. If it didn't have that counter, email would make you far less anxious. But it would lose its work value as a task manager.


6. The future of email is not to become IM. Part of the value of email is that it's asynchronous: While you're getting actual work done, new messages pile up. You don't want to give everyone the chance to interrupt your work flow. You wouldn't get things done. And that's exactly the problem with turning email into IM, whether it's with push notifications or Google Wave: Yes it will get you answers instantly, but it would make everyone less productive.


7. The lack of innovation in email is because the underlying protocols suck. If you have a great idea about how to use or display the data in Twitter, all you need to read is the Twitter API docs. If you have a great idea in email, you need to know MIME (the encoder), SMTP (the message protocol), IMAP or Exchange (the access layer), and your email client (the viewer). The email technology stack is huge, wobbly, and antiquated.
   
   Take IMAP: a hugely inefficient, stateful protocol with an ugly message format. State-of-the art in the late 1990s, yes, but if you were to reinvent it today, you could do a much better job.
   
   We need to make it easier to innovate around the mail client. We could rip out everything (maybe save for SMTP) and build a great new stack that allows fast iteration. Make it easier to move the needle in email, and the needle will move.

Facebook's Dream vs. Reality

Two Social Search Ideas

I'm on a short vacation in the Mediterranean, and as always during trips, I get a bunch of ideas that seem smart when you're chilling on a beach but may be useless when confronted with the real world.

Here are two simple ideas that could make search more useful by accessing your social networks. Both ideas seem pretty obvious. So obvious and trivial, in fact, that I'm pretty sure someone has already tried this. I figured I'd still put them up for discussion.

Click Popularity

A recent article in the Economist points out that people like to follow the herd when confronted with many options. They buy the most popular cereal in a supermarket, and download the most popular songs in an online music store.

What if we extended this concept to search results? If search engines showed click counts for each item on the results page, SEOs would instantly start clicking away, making that measure completely useless.

But what if we integrated search and social networking? We could show just the click counts of your friends. Your friends have little incentive to skew results. They will have similar tastes and preferences as you do, so they will search for similar things and likely click on the same items on a results page. And you could be sure you clicked the "right" result – i.e. the one your friends clicked.

Query Trail Sharing

Search results are seldom perfect on the first try: Even Google can't read your mind. When searching for something specific, users often spend considerable amounts of time refining their queries.

For example, I was recently looking for the name of the Python function that lets me get a class member given a string with its name. The function is called 'getattr', but that had somehow escaped me. Here is the query trail for that day, reconstructed from my Google search history (The first and last queries are unrelated):

• Senator Everett Dirksen
  3:50 pm: Clicked "Everett Dirksen - Wikipedia"
• python classes
  4:11 pm: Clicked "9. Classes"
  4:16 pm: Clicked "7.7 Class definitions"
• python class advanced
  4:19 pm: Clicked "5.7. Advanced Special Class Methods
• python getattr
  4:21 pm: Clicked "4.4. Getting Object References With getattr"
  
• python semaphore
  4:59 pm: Clicked "15.3.4 Semaphore Objects"

By looking at word overlaps and the timestamps, one could now find out that the inner three queries belong together. When a friend searches for the same item, one could now show related queries.

Problems

Implementing both features is fairly straightforward and could likely be done with a bunch of Greasemonkey scripts. But the two huge problems are privacy and the number of friends needed to make this useful.

I doubt that users would dare to use this if they thought that their searches are watched by friends. Therefore, click counts and trail sharing should be anonymous: You don't know which one of your friends clicked where. Plus, it may be useful to filter those Jenna Jameson-related queries.

Second, you don't want to be the only one signed up for this service: You only profit from the feature if you have lots of friends signed up for it as well. Sure, we could also look at data from friends-of-friends and further layers, but that increases spamming opportunities and decreases privacy. Maybe it would make sense to integrate this with existing social networks, such as Xing or LinkedIn, and have people download a browser plugin. If Google or Yahoo did this in our post-AOL-leak world, there could be an public outcry.

Let me know in case you know a product that already does this.