[Infowarrior] - Why Email No Longer Rules

[Richard Forno]

Why Email No Longer Rules… And what that means for the way we  
communicate
By JESSICA E. VASCELLARO
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203803904574431151489408372.html

Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is  
over.

In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold— 
services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a  
piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago,  
this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate—in  
ways we can only begin to imagine.

We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the  
way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our  
messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are  
sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in  
turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much  
faster than email, and more fun.

Why wait for a response to an email when you get a quicker answer over  
instant messaging? Thanks to Facebook, some questions can be answered  
without asking them. You don't need to ask a friend whether she has  
left work, if she has updated her public "status" on the site telling  
the world so. Email, stuck in the era of attachments, seems boring  
compared to services like Google Wave, currently in test phase, which  
allows users to share photos by dragging and dropping them from a  
desktop into a Wave, and to enter comments in near real time.

Little wonder that while email continues to grow, other types of  
communication services are growing far faster. In August 2009, 276.9  
million people used email across the U.S., several European countries,  
Australia and Brazil, according to Nielsen Co., up 21% from 229.2  
million in August 2008. But the number of users on social-networking  
and other community sites jumped 31% to 301.5 million people.

"The whole idea of this email service isn't really quite as  
significant anymore when you can have many, many different types of  
messages and files and when you have this all on the same type of  
networks," says Alex Bochannek, curator at the Computer History Museum  
in Mountain View, Calif.

So, how will these new tools change the way we communicate? Let's  
start with the most obvious: They make our interactions that much  
faster.

Into the River
Years ago, we were frustrated if it took a few days for a letter to  
arrive. A couple of years ago, we'd complain about a half-hour delay  
in getting an email. Today, we gripe about it taking an extra few  
seconds for a text message to go through. In a few months, we may be  
complaining that our cellphones aren't automatically able to send  
messages to friends within a certain distance, letting them know we're  
nearby. (A number of services already do this.)

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These new services also make communicating more frequent and informal— 
more like a blog comment or a throwaway aside, rather than a crafted  
email sent to one person. No need to spend time writing a long email  
to your half-dozen closest friends about how your vacation went. Now  
those friends, if they're interested, can watch it unfold in real time  
online. Instead of sending a few emails a week to a handful of  
friends, you can send dozens of messages a day to hundreds of people  
who know you, or just barely do.

Consider Twitter. The service allows users to send 140-character  
messages to people who have subscribed to see them, called followers.  
So instead of sending an email to friends announcing that you just got  
a new job, you can just tweet it for all the people who have chosen to  
"follow" you to see. You can create links to particular users in  
messages by entering @ followed by their user name or send private  
"direct messages" through the system by typing d and the user name.

Facebook is part of the trend, too. Users post status updates that  
show up in their friends' "streams." They can also post links to  
content and comment on it. No in-box required.

Dozens of other companies, from AOL and Yahoo Inc. to start-ups like  
Yammer Inc., are building products based on the same theme.

David Liu, an executive at AOL, calls it replacing the in-box with "a  
river that continues to flow as you dip into it."

But the speed and ease of communication cut both ways. While making  
communication more frequent, they can also make it less personal and  
intimate. Communicating is becoming so easy that the recipient knows  
how little time and thought was required of the sender. Yes, your half- 
dozen closest friends can read your vacation updates. But so can your  
500 other "friends." And if you know all these people are reading your  
updates, you might say a lot less than you would otherwise.

Too Much Information
Another obvious downside to the constant stream: It's a constant stream.

That can make it harder to determine the importance of various  
messages. When people can more easily fire off all sorts of messages— 
from updates about their breakfast to questions about the evening's  
plans—being able to figure out which messages are truly important, or  
even which warrant a response, can be difficult. Information overload  
can lead some people to tune out messages altogether.

Such noise makes us even more dependent on technology to help us  
communicate. Without software to help filter and organize based on  
factors we deem relevant, we'd drown in the deluge.

Enter filtering. In email land, consumers can often get by with a few  
folders, if that. But in the land of the stream, some sort of more  
sophisticated filtering is a must.

On Facebook, you can choose to see updates only from certain people  
you add to certain lists. Twitter users have adopted the trend of  
"tagging" their tweets by topic. So people tweeting about a company  
may follow their tweet with the # symbol and the company name. A  
number of software programs filter Tweets by these tags, making it  
easier to follow a topic.

The combination of more public messages and tagging has cool search  
and discovery implications. In the old days, people shared photos over  
email. Now, they post them to Flickr and tag them with their location.  
That means users can, with little effort, search for an area, down to  
a street corner, and see photos of the place.

Tagging also is creating the potential for new social movements.  
Instead of trying to organize people over email, protesters can tweet  
their messages, tag them with the topic and have them discovered by  
others interested in the cause. Iranians used that technique to  
galvanize public opinion during their election protests earlier this  
year. It was a powerful example of what can happen when messages get  
unleashed.

Who Are You?
Perhaps the biggest change that these email successors bring is more  
of a public profile for users. In the email world, you are your name  
followed by a "dot-com." That's it. In the new messaging world, you  
have a higher profile, packed with data you want to share and possibly  
some you don't.

Such a public profile has its pluses and minuses. It can draw the  
people communicating closer, allowing them to exchange not only text  
but also all sorts of personal information, even facial cues. You know  
a lot about the person you are talking to, even before you've ever  
exchanged a single word.

Take, for example, Facebook. Message someone over the site and,  
depending on your privacy settings, he may be a click away from your  
photos and your entire profile, including news articles you have  
shared and pictures of that party you were at last night. The extra  
details can help you cut to the chase. If you see that I am in London,  
you don't need to ask me where I am. They can also make communication  
feel more personal, restoring some of the intimacy that social-network  
sites—and email, for that matter—have stripped away. If I have posted  
to the world that I am in a bad mood, you might try to cheer me up, or  
at least think twice about bothering me.

Email is trying to compete by helping users roll in more signals about  
themselves. Yahoo and Google Inc. have launched new profile services  
that connect to mail accounts. That means just by clicking on a  
contact, one can see whatever information she has chosen to share  
through her profile, from her hobbies to her high school.

But a dump of personal data can also turn off the people you are  
trying to communicate with. If I really just want to know what time  
the meeting is, I may not care that you have updated your status  
message to point people to photos of your kids.

Having your identity pegged to communication creates more data to  
manage and some blurry lines. What's fine for one sort of recipient to  
know about you may not be acceptable for another. While our growing  
digital footprints have made it easier for anyone to find personal  
information about anyone online if they go search for it, new  
communications tools are marrying that trail of information with the  
message, making it easier than ever for the recipient to uncover more  
details.

A Question of Time
Meanwhile, one more big question remains: Will the new services save  
time, or eat up even more of it?

Many of the companies pitching the services insist they will free up  
people.

Jeff Teper, vice president of Microsoft Corp.'s SharePoint division,  
which makes software that businesses use to collaborate, says in the  
past, employees received an email every time the status changed on a  
project they were working on, which led to hundreds of unnecessary  
emails a day. Now, thanks to SharePoint and other software that allows  
companies to direct those updates to flow through centralized sites  
that employees can check when they need to, those unnecessary emails  
are out of users' in-boxes.

"People were very dependent on email. They overused it," he says.  
"Now, people can use the right tool for the right task."

Perhaps. But there's another way to think about all this. You can  
argue that because we have more ways to send more messages, we spend  
more time doing it. That may make us more productive, but it may not.  
We get lured into wasting time, telling our bosses we are looking into  
something, instead of just doing it, for example. And we will no doubt  
waste time communicating stuff that isn't meaningful, maybe at the  
expense of more meaningful communication. Such as, say, talking to  
somebody in person.

—Ms. Vascellaro is a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal's San  
Francisco bureau. She can be reached at jessica.vascellaro at wsj.com