Is Email On The Way Out?
by Dan HarrelsonYesterday on Twitter, Robert Scoble posted that he is giving up on email in favor of posting in the public forums of Twitter and Facebook. His dialog, including my response via tweet, is below. Basically, Scoble’s argument, as I understand it, is that an message left in a public space may be responded to by anyone. Also, a public message can be viewed by anyone, so we all learn a little. This is what he calls “scale.”
Is he right? Is one-to-one communication dead? I think not.
Email still has a very secure place in our online world. Most of my “important” communication is aimed for just one or two select people. I don’t need to go onto the rooftop with a megaphone if I want to let my colleague know that his work is complete. I just need to email him and the rest of the world isn’t bothered with a message that means nothing to them.
Communication to a single person, or a select group, is still important and will continue to use the mechanisms that serve it best, like phone and email. There’s a place for broadcasting and there is a place for personal one-to-one communication. Using a broadcast tool like Twitter or Facebook to talk to a single individual fills up the space with unnecessary clutter.
Partial transcript of Scobleizer from Twitter, latest at top:
@seekground: but the advantage of public messages is even if I ignore you others can answer your questions. A lot of my email is tech suppor
Translation to the past 20 tweets: I need an assistant to answer my email. Outsource what you hate. I hate email.
………
@dharrels called me a “tool.” OK wiseguy. You want to answer my email? I didn’t think so.
dharrels: Scoble is twittering that he is giving up on email and only using Twitter and Facebook to communicate. What a tool.
Basically this is my gesture to the world: I am not answering my email and I’m not going to start. I’m overloaded. Tweet me.
………
If something really needs to be private than email is great. But most of my email doesn’t need to be private.
I always answer things in public space first. Why? Because those communications scale.
@arikb: yeah, email still has SOME value. But going down all the time. I far prefer people not send me private notes. Scalable communication.
PR people are the worst in the email regard. Speaker planners are close. I don’t answer a lot of my email anymore. If I did, I’d never do.
It’s amazing that in this age of Twitter that people still send email. I hate email. I hate direct Tweets. I hate Facebook messages.
This entry was posted
on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 9:36 pm and is filed under Communication.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
This post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
August 7th, 2007 at 6:17 pm
He’s lost touch with reality. Or, he’s again lost touch with reality. Or, once again we have evidence that he’s lost touch with reality.
This prognostication should be filed next to, “Email will make paper postal mail obsolete,” and, “The web will make magazines obsolete.”
(I’m not saying he said the latter two items, but…you get my point.)
August 8th, 2007 at 5:41 am
Someone once said that blogging is email with “cc:world”. While this is true, I think it would be incredibly odd to reach a place (as apparently Scoble has) that I would want ALL my emails to cc:world. Too much of my email is either private or confidential to make this realistic at all… and those needs are not going to change over time.
Scoble is the exception to the rule, not the precursor to a new way of communicating sans email.
August 8th, 2007 at 7:19 am
The user isn’t always us, folks. For some demographics, it’s already out. We recently interviewed teens about their digital media usage and my favorite quote was “Oh, email? I use that for grandparents only.” SMS for the intimate group of friends, and MySpace for the extended network (where a “bulletin” might be analogous to blogging) and the messaging might be analogous to…oh crap I dunno).
August 8th, 2007 at 8:01 am
Yes, Steve, the user isn’t always us — or Scoble. I’m so tired of pundits making claims based on the fact that they’re white men with lots of resources (educational and $$), career flexibility, and power. They can take risks by being in public forums, just like men tend to feel more comfortable walking city streets late at night than women do. And anecdotally, design research done another friend on teens shows evidence that it’s all well and good when you’re a teenager to post things on MySpace comments and Facebook walls, but at some points, reality slaps a lot of kids in the face — someone who isn’t supposed to read about your party hijinx does — and they develop a more nuanced view of what ought to be public and private.
August 8th, 2007 at 9:55 am
By trying too hard to get ahead of the curve, he’s gone off on a tangent.
August 8th, 2007 at 11:31 am
Steve - You say, “For some demographics, it’s already out.” I disagree. It’s not that email is out for those teens, it’s that it is not yet in. When virtually all of your digital communication is done socially, email is not that important. As soon as those teens join the workforce, I’m confident that they’ll quickly begin to use email, because their methods of social communication are inappropriate in the workplace.
I agree that people used email for things five years ago that are now done via other means… but that doesn’t mean email is dying. It’s just becoming more specialized.
August 8th, 2007 at 12:58 pm
[…] Scoble drops email - chooses to twitter and facebook his communication with the world. I’m so tired of his schtick. Like seeing his previously private conversations are something people need or want. He constantly wraps this decision in the idea of scale - scalable communication. This is as equally annoying as public pronouncements of email bankruptcy, to me bankruptcy by an individual is a shameful last resort when they have become overwhelmed. Scoble shouldn’t be so proud to announce his email bankruptcy, he’s dropping accountability in favor of convenience and we’re all going to be subjected to even more self-egrandizing monologues from this character. What does he do all day anyway? He’s not the harbinger of email’s demise, he’s just a noisy blogger who is too lazy to solve the real communication problem in favor of buzz-words and fads. add to del.icio.us | digg this | blogs […]
August 8th, 2007 at 6:02 pm
> I’m confident that they’ll quickly begin to use email, because their methods of social communication are inappropriate in the workplace.
Ummm…work-and-home blurring, corporate IM, web-surfing-at-work, how many trends can you see from where you are sitting that run counter to your prognostication?
August 8th, 2007 at 9:02 pm
Twitter and Email address of the problem is different, I think this is no contradiction between the two.
August 9th, 2007 at 4:15 am
He’s just generating hype for himself by wading into a useless debate.
August 12th, 2007 at 12:46 am
We’re in a time where there’s an unusual explosion in communication media & channels. So there’s a lot of experimentation going on…behaviors evolving. With both the social and technical changes occuring, it’s hard to say where the bulk of us/the bell curve will be in 5-10 yrs.
At present — anecdotally — email is still very dominant in my business/corporate worlds. IT people tell me that email technology provides for a level of security, controllability, scalability, user features etc. that no other comm tech provides (yet). I see companies adding IM, adding blogs, adding wikis — but not stopping email use, any more than they’re stopping telephone use.
On the personal side — again anecdotal — email does seem to be struggling — in that most people get so friggin’ many of them, that people are overwhelmed. So ironically while there’s more email than ever, email is less and less useful as a comm channel.
Given the proliferation of comm channels and the hard limit of only 24 hrs in anybody’s day — it makes sense that a person would pick the channels that work for them in their specific life/use case. So yay Scoble if he can drop email entirely….most people that I know of, esp people who are working in the corporate environment, can’t do that, for now, anyway.
August 24th, 2007 at 8:21 pm
Hah! Kudos for calling Scoble a tool. I like the guy, but it’s hilarious to see someone call him out like that.
Great post, as well.
September 5th, 2007 at 4:17 pm
Scoble finally admits that Email Ain’t Going Away
October 14th, 2007 at 9:15 am
[…] email and pledges allegiance to Twitter and Facebook. In response, Dan Harrelson of Adaptive Path calls him a tool. Now “tool” might be a bit harsh, but I cannot for the life of me understand why […]