Social Networks Will Kill Email?
…One of the aspects of email that has made it universal is that anyone can can send anyone else a message given their email address. It’s open at a fundamental level.
A social network like Twitter is both open and closed: anyone can mention me — send a public message — but only those that I follow can send me a private message (a direct message in Twitterspeak). This is a powerfully subtle aspect of Twitter: the only means for the unfollowed to reach me is through public discourse.
I think there is a place for a Twitter client that fronts as an email client too, as a transitional stepping stone away from inbound email, and also to deal with the reality that not everything worth being said can be compressed into 140 characters (see Liquid Email). I wonder if Twitter is going to build this, or not?
Social networks are not email and will not replace email, particularly for internal communications. What makes email so pervasive, useful, and accessible is that it is open, which is the exact opposite of social networks.
What people are trying to make things like Twitter into are merely bastardized forms of instant messaging. Many businesses are using IM tools pretty effectively, and it is an invaluable tool in certain industries where speed of communications is critical, like trading floors. In fact, IM already pretty well encompasses what most people think the future of email should be; trusted connections, instantaneous, receiver status, file exchange, multimedia communications, etc. And guess what, that same IM client is now giving you social media feeds!
Yet, we still want to create something different, which is laudable as email could use some improvements. Let’s not force the issue however by taking existing networks and morphing them into something they are not. It is the proverbial square peg and round hole issue. Twitter has decided that they are a media company and will continue down that path, and I would not be surprised if DM’s or protected twitter accounts go away in a couple of years.
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Social networks are not email and will not replace email, particularly for internal communications. What makes email so...
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