^^^OPEN PLENARY: Email is Dead. Discuss!
Thursday, June 03, 2004 • 4:30 - 5:45pm

Are we trying to bang the round email peg into square holes it simply wasn't designed for? What do do we mean when we say email anyway? Email's openness was a factor for its adoption, is it cause for decline or will it resemble what we know and love? Will Weblogs, syndication, wikis and instant messaging replace email? Listen to the debate as experts place their own visions of the future next to one another and argue about the most likely scenario.

• Moderator — Jeff Ubois, Analyst, Ferris Research
• Panelist — Ben Gross, Researcher, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
• Panelist — Ross Mayfield, CEO, Founder, Socialtext
• Panelist — Steve Gillmor, Editor, Messaging and Collaboration Center, eWEEK.com
• Panelist — Dave Crocker, Principal, Brandenburg InterNetworking

Share your notes, comments and questions

There's a great discussion beginning on this in the Inbox Blog and on Email is NOT Dead but why we Love RSS too!

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notes Matt Mahoney

Q: Is email dead?

Audience response: trust in email reached a peak 2-3 years ago. life support is more appropriate

Steve: Email belief is shaken. Moving towards other technologies: RSS, social software. Opportunities to carry on in a connected universe.

Was: browser 40% time, email 40% time, rest divided up.
Today: most webrowsing is managed by a RSS reader (45-50%). Email is an exercise in futility, responding to ppl who refuse to go via other channels (e.g. IM), about 20%.

Ross: The point is that ppl are looking for alternatives. Now at the point where maybe 20% of email is productive, ppl are looking for other modalities: RSS, weblogs, IM...

Inbox is where you're opened up to the rest of the world.

Email wasn't designed for many to many. It's for one to one or one to few.

Ross: Ziff Davis was looking to solve the email time problem. Each team member was getting 100/day for certain projects. Now it's at zero using other modalities.

The only problem with email is its a victim of its own openness.

Dave: We had email. But one size fits all tool. Starting to get more tools. This is great. But doesn't mean email is dead. Will be used in certain contexts. This is all good.

Steve: What are those?

Dave: We need to talk at the level of human communication. Use the right tool for the right communication. Asynchronous tools.

Ross: There's persistence in RSS aggregators, so can do offline.

Yet with RSS the user has complete control over what they subscribe to b/c it's pull, not push. Less risk for spam.

Jeff: Looking ahead then, what mechanisms to intro for trust?

Dave: 20 yrs ago internet was a gated community. Now...

We find ways to manage the complexity, but we don't throw all the models out. We need to pay attention to what the uses are, then design the tools.

For email, we need to change a collection of things to add on top of it.

Steve: Esther mentioned the reference problem (pointers are better than 10,000 copies). But look back, the VB applications have gone away with browser adoption.

Dave: All replaced with javascript.

Steve: I'm not saying the functionality is going away, but the tools change.

Email as point-to-point tool has many flaws, likely to be remedied by a reputation-based tool.

Jeff: Migration is expensive, Ben...

Ben: The email client will subsume RSS, what have you.

Jeff: If we changed the nomenclature, does that help?

Dave: A messaging client.

Jeff: topic change...

Ross: IM.

Next Gen'ers have 5-7 windows open at a time. When they're online, they're there. They're not lurking. When they're off the net, they're off.

With the IM, the real problem is interruption. Interruption tax is 15 min, the time to recover following a ping. Not everyone can adapt to partial attention. Ppl adapt in diff ways. Need tools for diff fits.

Email came in bottom up. In schools, e.g. Same is happening with tools in other modalities.

Jeff: So putting email with IM, etc.

Ross: Yes, and wikis

Jeff: How many ppl expect to move into other spaces, like wikis, in the next year.

10 or so hands.

Esther: I expect to them to switch into email.

Dave: The idea for the grand unified architecture for messaging is so appealing. And every time someone's tried, they've failed.

Ross was close, but email wasn't designed. Over those 4-5 years, a lot of activity trying to figure it out. Gopher, etc.

The way to get it, is not to go for it, but to go after several pieces over time.

Audience: I think what Esther and others is saying is different.

Take my email and IM, glue them together, stick them in an architecture on the network, let me interact from multiple devices with an integrated identity.

Dave: That's Intelligent Network. That failed.

Audience: Actually, Intelligent Network isn't it. This is more distributed.

Dave: Ah, I get it now. But that's a hard problem. Somebody should work on that.

Esther: Landed in NY during blackout. Great, holiday. Using computer, it dies. Not great. The point is these systems are fragile. We need redundant systems. An integrated user experience. We know it's not easy, but make it look easy for us, the users.

Ross: A lot of power to hand over design to individual users. Like wikis. Users designing it the way they need. Like gaming. Powerful gaming engines that game designers took off with.

We need to hand over as much control as we can. Built on open standards. Developing at a faster clip.

Jeff: Social interactions...

Audience: Elizabeth: Think to MUDs. Ppl were making things, "distributing" them via conversations. It's a socio-technical practice of extension. That's where we're see a lot of the tools and practices ossify.

Jeff: Any use cases about these type of power users...

Ross: Well, the Ziff Davis case that was up earlier. The manager make one request: cc the weblog. Then steps back.

The team develops their own simple way of editing on the fly using a webpage, links and attaching things.

Audience: Example: Paired programming and VoIP. Programmers performed better when each had a keyboard.

Audience: With 12 hour time differences, how can anything be synchronous.

Ross: There are very asynch tools. Several ppl in this room use wikis on 12 hour schedules that you raise.

My guess is we're going to have to move away from IM and voice for that reason.

Another note: social networking can be a mechanism, perhaps not a total solution, but an interesting one, through the activities of maintaining the relationships and reputations, can reduce spam. A study at UCLA published it could be a 50% reduction.

That's why Google is in such a great position. They have Gmail, they have Orkut. It could be a great whitelist.

Steve: Esther, why will it all go into the email client?

Esther: It's an accident of history. 20 years ago it would have been 1-2-3.

Back to Orkut, in no way can it be a whitelist. There's no Remove as Friend button.

Ben: Actually there is, but it's undefined.

Steve: Reputation is the coin of the realm. Take blogs. My relationship with the ppl who I take to be my peers or authority figures is very important to me. As well as what they say and what they point me too. It's metadata that's already there.

Audience: It's your web of trust, it's your hierarchy.

Steve: That's right.

Dave: I think we're wandering around in a space that we know very little about, which makes it interesting but confusing. There's publishing and there's interacting, but they're similar, but they're not the same thing. We shouldn't confuse the tools as paradigms.