Reading Louis Gray’s thoughts on activity streams and email got me thinking about mail and the web and where we might be headed. I’m with Louis — while the promise of activity streams is intriguing, I’m pretty skeptical when I hear someone sounding the death knell for email as a medium. I would think that anything that’s been adopted on the scale that email has promises to be around for awhile, although I’m sure someone could point me to an example (cassette tapes, the telegram) to the contrary.
That being said, there are some uses of email that feel like trying to using a butter knife to cut a steak. To help make sense of it all in my head and get some idea of what email might look like a few years out, I decided to map out the most common current uses of email, and potential replacements* that exist currently or seem to be sitting on the horizon.
| Use | Replacement(s) | Barriers | Likelihood of replacement |
| Quick hits (20-300 character range) | IM, Twitter, SMS | Adoption, ease-of-use, messaging fees | Medium. There are definitely messages I used to send/receive via email which happen exclusively via IM, SMS and Twitter now. Still, it seems hard to imagine Twitter, SMS or anything else becoming SO much easier or cheaper than email that this use will ever completely die. |
| Long, threaded conversations |
Google Wave, Basecamp | Adoption | High. Outside of Gmail, threaded conversations via email don’t work real well. Whether or not Wave is the silver bullet remains to be seen, but the potential organizational cost savings to be realized would make this seem like a problem use for email that will get replaced. |
| Tasks |
Outlook, Basecamp | Adoption | High. Just as with threaded conversations, task delegation and management may be one of the most common email misuses. At some point, a simple, cross-platform way to assign and track tasks will emerge. There’s too much potential ROI at the enterprise level to keep this one down forever. |
| Invitations | Evite, Google Calendar, Outlook | Interoperability | Low. There have been alternatives to inviting people to an event or meeting via email for years. But warring standards (Outlook vs. iCal) have prevented invitations from breaking out of email as their primary channel. |
| Commercial Offers | Twitter, Facebook | Billions of opt-in email lists | Low. As often as the commercial functions of email are derided as spam, the idea that marketers will stop using email en masse is pretty laughable. After all, we’ve called it “junk mail” for decades now, and yet its volume only seems to increase with every passing year. Marketers will continue to jump into new channels like Twitter and Facebook — they just won’t stop trying to communicate via email as well. |
| Hilarious Forwards | Twitter, Facebook | Late adopters | High. Retweeting may very well be the new email forward. And eventually, Michael Scott and his ilk will find their way to Twitter, Facebook, etc. But don’t be surprised if they’re on the back-end of the adoption curve and we’ve already moved onto a new platform by the time they do. |
Looking at email and how we use it today, what it’s good at and what it’s not so good at, it seems to point to integration as its poorest function as a messaging platform. It can deliver a message, but if there’s anything that’s supposed to happen besides reading that message, that’s where things start to break down or require human interaction to further the process. Unless we can make progress taking email messages and handling them differently based on what they contain (quick message, a longer conversation/thread, a list of tasks, an invitation), email as a communications medium really does stand a good chance of being replaced for a number of its most common current functions and evolving into something closer to SMS or Twitter. Quick hits with limited information payload driving towards one simple interaction — a click into an environment with a broader range of potential interactions.
However, while email may very well be replaced as a channel for certain uses, particularly those where individuals and organizations can recognize a cost benefit from the change, the low cost and significant data equity investment (how many people out there could really pull off migrating their entire address book and message archive?) make it a tough act to beat in the consumer space and seem to ensure it won’t completely disappear for a long, long time.
So don’t go throwing away that prime @gmail.com address just yet.
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* NOTE: I know, there are plenty more potential replacements for each of these — I tried to come up with some of the more widely-adopted options today…feel free to add any that you think are better contenders to supplant email in the comments.
