To all the girls I loved before,
To all the girls I cheated on before,
To all the girls I loved before,
– To all the Girls, Wyclef Jean, The CarnivalThis goes out to all the email I’ve loved before . . . to all the email I used to know. For all the mailtos waiting for a response, action, or just to hear from me again . . . I still love you, but it ain’t working out.
Maybe I’m too focused on other things, not listening to you, or we’ve grown apart. I wish I knew how to quit you email.
It’s not you, definitely me, and no I don’t think we can still be friends.
If you need to reach me and my business, leave a comment on my blog, and I’ll respond with a personalized RSS feed.
This lament, with props to Wyclef Jean, got me thinking about how broken email is and whether it’s time for business to communicate with blogs, RSS, and abandon email. Just this week a colleague told me how his email server got hacked and he has spent days delisting himself from spam blacklist houses — he gets hacked and now can’t send email to anyone, including clients — and he’s using instant messaging and a phone. Wondering what I’m up to? Check my blog and IM me because who knows if I’ll get your email and actually respond to it.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
alex 02.27.06 at 3:07 am
I can see how email can be replaced by blogs for a number of things in business like for example general announcements, discussions on or follow-up of projects… However, the nature of the email is deeply different from the nature of the blog and I think email still has a bright future. And I don’t think that a change of medium is the right way to deal with one’s failure to manage security of infotech infrastructure. It may be a way to react in an emergency situation, but that’s all. I fail to see how blogging can durably replace email.
-b- 02.27.06 at 7:13 am
Alex,
I wish I shared your optimism about email. Part of my lament is how long have we had email — like 20 years + and it’s still the same basic program and that’s what’s broken because of the volumes of mail. You can filter all day, flag for follow-up, run rules and still have an incredible amount you can’t get to. Granted, I still need asynchronous communication - where I can respond when I can and only allow a few people to interrupt my day with an instant message, but what if there was an iTunes approach to email, where I could start a whitelist of 100 people and say, “these people I want to see, the rest put somewhere else and tell me if it’s important.”
I’m sort of doing that now with OS X and spotlight, where I’ve stop caring what my folder structure looks like and just search for everything. A colleague of mine once had such an email overload, then he bought a new laptop and left the old one behind. I’m doing this crazy entourage to mail process where I can have a robust search. (Note I since abandoned backpack and other AJAXY Web 2.0 apps that made it worse for me)