Comments on: Maybe Email Isn’t Dead After All

By: Jake

Jake — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 21:02:06 +0000

My thought is that email should be the consolidated stream, since you use it a lot. All those services should pump notifications into your email, and why not allow email to control them too, a la mail list daemons, by just sending commands. So, if you get a note from Mix about a comment on your session idea, you should be able to reply via the email.

Incidentally, spam on Twitter is a non-issue for me, since I can ignore or block requests. But then again, that's how I feel about email spam, and that puts me in the minority, as we've previously discussed.

By: oraclebase

oraclebase — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:41:45 +0000

The incorporation of email into a lifestream would be good except for spam. As new communication methods become popular, spam hits them too. I've not been a twitter user for long, but I'm already starting to see an increate in twitter spam.

Currently, I get people asking questions on my forum, email, twitter, Oracle Wiki, Oracle Mix, LinkedIn etc. If would be nice if all these things were consolidated into a single uber-stream.

As it is, they are not, so I can either keep checking several services, or rely on email notification to tell me what to look at. For me, email is a useful notification service, more than a collaboration tool.

Cheers

Tim…

By: Jake

Jake — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 20:20:57 +0000

We're the same age, so tail end of Gen X. I use email more than anything else, but my communication has become more distributed over the past 2 years or so, including social networks, Twitter, IM, SMS, etc., depending on the conversation.

As for Facebook, their goal is to get you to stay in FB all the time. They have O/S aspirations, ergo the chat, the inbox, the apps, etc. This model works for younger people, but not so much for email diehards. They want to draw you in with the social aspect and hook you, keeping your communication inside the walled garden. That's why the bacn email never has much content.

By: Jim

Jim — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 11:14:01 +0000

I like email. I'm 34 - so probably not in Generation Y. People have asked if I'll join Facebook, but I really don't get it. You sign up, and then if people get in touch, you get an email saying they got in touch on Facebook. As I'm not a fan of Facebook, then why not just send me an email, with real content in it, instead of a link to Facebook?

By: Jake

Jake — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 09:02:04 +0000

Would be nice to have it all in a single place. Just like FriendFeed, it would need controls to throttle the noise. Actually, I find FF to be way noisier than I'd like. It was easier to handle before the deluge.

By: Andy C

Andy C — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 07:04:04 +0000

I would quite happily store all my (corporate) email/chat/outputs in Google Mail.

I think it is absolutely superb you can search gMail and pull out a snippet of a chat session.

I think it is brilliant I can reply to this Disqus comment from gMail.

My idea of nirvana would be a corporate lifestreaming app (a la FriendFeed) with every single employee compelled to use it (just as they are compelled to use Timesheets and Expenses).

2008/6/4 Disqus <>:

By: Jake

Jake — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 06:54:00 +0000

So, what do you think of is as an interface into other apps? Considering the fact that we can't get rid of it, do you think it's better to play along with what's known to people, or give them a new interface?

By: Andy C

Andy C — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 06:41:30 +0000

Many years ago I worked at Ingres who had the novel idea of using newsgroups for all internal technical discussions. The rationale was that an individual email cost the company $0.10.

15 years later, I am still wading through email lists where every single email is sent to N people.

15 years later, idiots still send me large attachments. Yes - we have shared files. Yes - we have Wikis. Yes - we have blogs. Yes - we have RSS. Yes - we have IM but people are attached to email like an IV drip.

Email isn't dead. We are cursed with it. Forever.