E-Mail is Obsolete

I've thought that e-mail was obsolete for a long time because it's so wasteful, stupid, and annoying. I guess that's how things that are free on the Internet always get? I used to spend hours reading and answering email, it seemed important. I used to look forward to reading it. Now I loathe it, and try to avoid it except perhaps half a dozen times a day just to fish out the really important work stuff from the sea of spam and idiocy even from people who are in fact important and from whom I do want to hear, when they stop sending me like 30 clippings from newspapers I already read on their web pages.

I long since stopped using the proprietary email systems like Outlook Express after having one too many nasty experiences losing all my email, where everything in fact was being kept (and that's how most people do it frankly). A computer geek reinstalled everything after a crash and forgets to save the dbx files out of Outlook and installed a new outlook over the old one. Grrrrrr. Since that time, I've struggled to save the dbx files out somewhere but they're hellish to try to read through later. After one more crash losing everything because I couldn't be bothered to try to fish out the files to save, that was it, I moved entirely to Yahoo and Juno online, the latter of which costs something to keep all that stuff on their servers (Yahoo is free and better, because it searches on key words better through the entire deck of emails.

I noticed Scoble referring more and more to how he hated email and didn't use it. I saw his reference today to "Feed Bankruptcy" marking everything as read. That concept of marking things as read or not simply never caught on with me 15 years ago and it won't catch on now. I realized that I just don't hardly use email anymore for anything substantive. I don't use a cell phone to talk live, either, or I'd go nuts and never get my jobs done. but email is not helpful.

That is, I have 4 email accounts, one of which is tied up only with news groups that spew out gadzillion numbers of articles, clippings, comments, etc. every day -- better they just be off by themselves where I can tune in once or twice a week. I have two others mainly for SL and related business. And the most important one for real-life work and family, which inevitably fills up not only with spam but newsgroups and discussion groups somehow escaping the confines of their other mail box.

Several times a day, I go in and try to do battle with these mail boxes, hoping to spot the authentic communications among the zillions of clippings. It's the ability to send news clippings and comment and discuss them that is the worst clutter factor now, that and those kind of people who feel they need to send you a picture of a cat and a funny joke at least once a day.

I realized that for "real" communications I go to:

o Skype -- not to call people, which is annoying, and I hate when they jam on me with calls, especially when I'm already on the other line, but I use their instant IM to reach people because I know they'll read it there
o Facebook -- very, very clear channel of inbox communications which are almost entirely spam free. Even the FB spam comes into a more general area, and if you signed up for an overly gregarious group that is spamming your inbox, you just leave it -- and it lets you leave and is really gone (unlikes so many other things related to email.
o Text messages on a mobile phone -- I don't like this, but other people especially kids send them

(If I were half my age, I might use AIM, but I just don't like all that instant stuff, so you could add AIM too if you like, or Meebo).

Last summer, when my family was off camping, I didn't hear from them for nearly a week and was getting worried. My usual technique in these cases when people go out of the reaches of cell phone and wireless coverage is to use Google with terms like "bear" and "eaten" and "tourists" and "11-car pile up" and "priced to sell immediately" and "arrested at border" combined with our last names. That system worked at least twice in my life, unfortunately, so I find it handy. It's also a handy way to catch your relatives selling on Craig's list something that you thought Mom had meant for you to have...

In any event, I couldn't seem to turn up my son at various e-mail addresses until finally, I realized that what I simply had to do was leave a Facebook message. That was answered within 6 hours. Why? Because even out in the boondocks, he bicycled like 11 miles to some grocery store in the middle of nowhere with one computer online that he used to check his Facebook, and didn't have time to check anything else or use the pay phone even to call collect, I guess.... Priorities, priorities. So Facebook is now my preferred message board.

What would they have to do to get email working again and make it an acceptable application for business, which it is rapidly ceasing to become? (Twitterers virtuously tell you they have beaten their 100 email messages every morning, but I'm not impressed, because I know they are a nervous wreck and that the nerves will play out somewhere else...)

I don't know if somewhere in Yahoo and these other places there is a political problem like there was with the Lindens and ad farms for 2 years. I wouldn't think so, but I don't know the politics. I know that they doesn't seem to be able to see their way clear to be able to eliminate ALL -- and I mean ALL -- communications with the word "Viagra" in them. That's because, as with the Lindens, there may be some techlib somewhere saying "But we don't want to delete any legitimate communications from legitimate businesses..."

By and large, the spam filter works, although it seems to have an uncanny ability to pick out and dump into the bulk mail the most important messages like "I thought I'd adjust your consulting fee upwards, but I need hear from you by 5 pm today" -- that sort of thing.

And it's still a shock to be browsing email and struggling through some Skyped office conference call and suddenly see some porn thing barking at you.

So what would these email manufacturers have to do to bring people back to using email, and lure them away from their cell phones, services like Facebook, and even Second Life messaging?

Answer: make it possible to read, sort, and save email better.

I always marvel -- I just plain boggle -- at the inability of a single software maker to do this. My God, we've had email for 15 years or more. Can't we have something that saves it with ease? That makes it easy to pull up a bunch of stuff on one topic more readily and more visually compelling?

Putting little tiny packages of bytes one by one into folders we have to make and then click on is just retarded. Come on people. This won't do.

Searching and getting 1,200 emails on that search word, and having to open up every single one, or press NEXT NEXT NEXT gadzillion times -- I mean, where else do you have to perform such a brain-dead function if you aren't the X-ray machine checker at the airport???

What's needed is something like a web site page. With a tag cloud of terms. Or a simple search box that really works well. And as you get emails, they don't go into little individual envelopes (that's an example of old technology still hobbling new technology with an old function design), but they go into big white pages in little clusters all visible at once, that you drag up or down or side ways or whatever. So your 100 emails from the day are all on one big page, but separated by white space.

You browse your page from top to bottom, or you use key words to jump from grouping to grouping. As you find text you want to save, you highlight and it simply saves as is, without any fuss, without going into some separate folder that you then have to access separately and browse through. It just stays in a big scroll. So to speak (a data base somewhere, whatever). It could physically disappear from your screen, but getting it back in all one big grab bag to look at would be as simple as pressing on a tag cloud, or typing in a key word like a person's name, a date, a job.

After all, you've got an important string of to/subject etc. Those things are already separate in a string. Why separate them into individual little envelope packages that are hard on the eyes, hard to physically plough through, and can't be saved efficiently?

If you sheared away all the trappings of the email box design -- folders, individual lines, etc. and completely freed yourself to start anew with design -- thinking of email as like, say, jello with marshmallows, then you will go far.

The bowl of jello -- the image can be a giant white page with black text, or it can have picture tags if you'd rather, and eventually they could even be in 3-D and you could pick them up -- can have highlighting colours.

So let's say red are those you haven't red, green are those you have saved, yellow are ones that will automatically expire without action (you can set it to do that for you, with days).

So as I think of it, on your desk top, instead of having to open up an application that has traditional frames and squares and stuff like folders, you have a blank white (or whatever colour works) screen, in which the messages just *arrive* and show *in toto*, not buried underneath a subject line in an inbox. They just show up. You may have pre-coded those from "Boss" to always show up in the top of your big white screen. Or you may have "News Group" to automatically save and tuck itself up into one long scroll of a read somewhere off camera.

As you see this message -- it could blink or be a colour -- you click on it. You read it. As a group of words coming from one person with a name and address, it stays contiguous, so that if you press on it again, it saves -- but again, in a document, where you can easily see everything from that person for that month (so much easier to follow the job or the conversation then).

BTW, I could mention that cell phones are absolutely idiotic with their interfaces, too (I absolutely loathe Virgin Mobile's messages and boxes) and those all need to be redone too -- but that will take more time because of the smallness of the screen.

What I'm after is a giant whiteboarding kind of effect where people asynchronously work with me and place messaging -- or pictures even or longer attached documents -- on to my desktop workspace for communications -- email is obsolete in its old form.

If I'm really wired, that person might have a space on my desk top where their video appears live, I might set up my own little village of people I want to always hear from "on top" so to speak, and then some layers down, other stuff.

Once somebody on my email is sort of "Facebooked," they always get tagged, saved, sorted, displayed etc reliably. This should be achieved by a right-click and a selection of a pie menu or something that is like "Priority" or something.

At some point, this nuttiness with the news clippings will stop, and somehow it will get better accessing them without registration so that you don't have to hump through a reading of a piece inside your little email box, and then decide how you will then drag and drop it over to a folder...which you will never read, and never see that thing again, since it would require individually opening and reading gadzillion messages. You will hope that Yahoo search might pick it out...if it's working.

Yes, email has to evolve. More like a big document being formed, or a big blank board, or a web page, more like a blinking IM, less like a sequestered mailbox.

Comments

[Prokofy Neva]

BTW, the Facebook people are kind of like virtual worlds, that got started out filling up their worlds with a lot of social and game stuff, drinks you send people and vampire bytes and silly groups.

But eventually they will evolve into "Facebook for Business" or something like that which shears off all the clutter and the drinks and movie trivia and functions as a clear channel. In fact, with just some discipline and a bit of severity, you can make it do that now by weeding out garrulous drink-sending friends.

The Facebook dude has something really, really golden now: people's clear channels without spam in them. He has to make this pay so that he has an incentive to keep making the donuts every morning, and we can be sure that he relieves us of Viagra spam.

Now's the time when he needs to make Facebook Premium which has a really great IM/mail/communications interface that also has the ability to have videos and such.

[Alex]

Hi, Prokofy
You are describing four problems:
1. How to make e-mails easier to find (actually gmail does it beautifully, I suggest trying it).
2. How to solve spam problem. The ONLY solution is in pure economics - make 'priority mail' or whatever you call it a premium service. There can be ways for an adressee to return the 'stamp' cost. It has been well studied and it is a well known fact that 20c price tag on an e-mail would do away with 'viagra' stuff.
3. Identity and 'social graph'. You want your mailer to KNOW 'who's this guy' and prioritize the e-mails accordingly. Can be done, but NOT 'facebook-like'. Facebook is a dead end, it is going to nowhere.
4. Visual metaphor/representation. This is the most interesting problem. Actually 2D 'desktop' would not be cool enough for a fast adoption (IMHO). How about 3D 'office'? It's doable, btw. I think we finish this thing (60% ready right now) by May. I promise to give you one. :)
Regards.

[Prokofy Neva]

1. No, gmail is no different, it still has the same concept of folders and layout like any box, it's not tag clouds as I envision, it merely has a better search engine, not surprisingly, being Google.

2. People will pay for email if it comes to them without spam, but the big companies that continue to offer free mail and spam filters are victims of their own success, people will find it difficult to pay for this now. But pay they must; it does cost something.

3. I don't care about "social graph" -- that's just some dumb geeky thing that is rigid and immoveable, as if fluid human relationships and networks could be reduced to a static footprint that somebody could snag a copy of and sell to eternally.

What I'm talking about is me having control over that flow of communications such that I can pick out key words as I would of Internet texts using Google, and arrange it visually in ways that help me to work on it -- and save it in a more intuitive way.

4. What thing are you finishing by May? I didn't get the reference.

[Alex]

3. That's exactly what I was saying. Human relationships are too fluid, they don't fit into a rigid scheme of 'friendships' and 'groups', that's why Facebook-type game is a dead end.
4. A '3D office' for e-mails and collaboration. And there will be some avatarized 'assistants'/robots in this personal office later on. :)

[Prokofy Neva]

Re 3: well, I don't think Facebook is dead or will die just because tekkies are stupid and try to reduce fluid relationships to graphs. Perhaps dealing at the crowd-control macro level that tekkies love to deal with, they will find patterns and try to work with them and push them. But the minute they become too confining, people will move on. Or the best and the brightest will move on.

At this point, Facebook is still semi-useful precisely because of the clear channel. I do have to put up with some friends and relatives who send me junk every day -- it's like the sort of spam you can't turn off because you don't want to hurt the person's feelings. You can eventually get rid of some of these worst friendly spammers (i.e. who send you cat pictures, not Viagra ads) by gradually trimming them away of just deleting them.

And it's the ability still to have the freedom to do something like friend Will Wright on Facebook that is still fascinating, but I find that I forget to check it some days because none of the stuff people are doing in it -- contests, music trading, etc. -- is interesting to me.

[Alex]

'Clear channel' is a good way to put it. The scheme of 'friends' and 'groups' is dead and I can explain why. It is dead because YOUR immediate state of mind is not taken into account. And that's why they feel 'stupid' and 'rigid'. That's why people use them mostly as a 'hang-outs'. They are designed for people who don't know what they are doing at the time (or are 'hangin-out' if you will :) ).
The opposite approach would be: to ask what exactly the user is doing right now (twitter-like question... MAYBE), then adjust the whole application immediately and SERVE you with what may be necessary for what you are doing. See what I mean?
The application should adjust to the user present state, not she or he would need to 'reconfigure' the damn stupid thing to the immediate need. And that is... probably (I tend to believe it)... THE 'next big thing'. In a peculiar way it seems to be more doable and understandable within the 3D world environment and avatarized representation. Just because our brain 'UNDERSTANDS' and REMEMBERS (Philip had said it somewhere and it's true) it better.

[Prokofy Neva]

Yes, I think that's a very good analysis, Alex. You want what you want right now, not what you wanted yesterday.

The secret to Twitter, however, is to understand that when it asks "What are you doing right now?" (Facebook is no different with its "status" thing) only after a few weeks of Buddhism, did people then drop it.

They don't answer that question; they answer another one: "what are you thinking right now?"

"What are you noticing and wishing to share right now?"

"What do you wish to show off about right now?"

etc.

And that's why it stuck.

If people reported faithfully what they are doing, the vision of a lot of pale, overweight or gangly people at their computer terminals typing inanities would be off-putting.

It's only because some of them could show off taking Twitter on their cell phones (more expensive!) that they could write, "Talking to Jimmy at Davos now" or "Waiting for the flight to Tokyo and planning for my fabulous board meeting" etc.

Then enough other normal people could put "waiting for my wife to have a baby" or "seeing if she'll ask me home with her" etc that it could spice a little more interest.

Read it now, however, for the Metarati, and it's just a vanity linker. That's ok, I don't mind it, because it has good stuff on it every day like Steve Rubel, Robert Scoble, etc. It's a microblogger.

Now, as to your idea that this fluid state is something I need for email and don't want groups, I disagree.

There is a group of people I've worked with for 25 years, I will never be wanting to shed them, my colleagues in my field, my work friends, people on jobs I do, etc. I want them to be easily taggable and always be searchable.

Then there's relatives who have been with me for the last 51 years, I can hardly dump them, as much as some of them "need" dumping. You know, that kind of thing.

Facebook tried to freeze those things into activities, however, and that is what grates. I want the clear channel to my nieces etc. but I don't want also to have to get the same movie star quiz they've sent to all their boyfriends.

[Ann Otoole]

i hate email. i have some email accounts i have used on certain sl related websites. any connect to those accounts reveals hundreds of bogus spam messages. email is pretty worthless these days. i agree an instant messenger account is much better since you have control over who can contact you. facebook has privacy problems and has marked themselves for an eventual demise because of it. once enough people realize all there private activities are broadcast all over they will eventually discontinue using the service.

[Cocoanut Koala]

Skimmed this one, too, since I'm still recovering from toothy things.

I just want to say I read my e-mail at least every couple of months, whether it needs reading or not.

haha

coco

[Alex]

Just a quick comment on:
"Now, as to your idea that this fluid state is something I need for email and don't want groups, I disagree."
Your examples are not exactly 'groups'. You can call them 'groups' if you feel comfortable with the word, but in fact they are INDIVIDUAL relationships having some degree of similarity. F.i. let's take a look at imaginary 'group' named 'relatives' in your example of a niece(s) and "some of them" that "... "need" dumping". In terms of FB classification they would be a 'group', but in fact they are a 'collection'/'set' or very different individual relationships IN A CURRENT STATE (!!!). That's what I meant to say.

As to 'twitter-like question' - you are right, there is a problem how to interpret an answer, but it is doable too. There must be several separate agents matching it with a particular aspect of the state of your life, projects, knowledge. It's a long story to tell. Some day. :)

Anyway, thank you for this discussion. I was glad to have an opportunity to compare our points of view on this problem.
Regards.

[andy]

why is everyone so quick to label email as obsolete. It's used extensively in business, I check my email daily and communicate with clients often via email. I have a few email accounts with hotmail and gmail. hotmail is exquisitely annoying as spam mail consistently builds up in my inbox and junk mail but gmail is excellent, i haven't had a single spam message enter my inbox. I also pay for email hosting for my website and constantly check, reply and send out emails to clients or people who have questions. As far as I know there is nothing on the internet or in another form that makes email obsolete. I can't see communication getting any better unless people send messages via a hologram that pops out of there cellphone or computer screen. Someone mentioned something about 3D email, would that not be rediculous as some messages are private or contain important and confidential information, which is why we have email accounts, so we don't have to send this type of information over facebook or twitter.

[Prokofy Neva]

I don't label it as obsolete. I continue to use it and try to tame it. But I also migrate to other things that have a cleaner and more useable interface and functionality.

I'm not suggesting the contents of my mail be public. I'm suggesting it be more accessible to search and save and use *on my desktop*.