Can We Kill Email?
One of the most interesting discussions I had in San Francisco two weeks ago (where I was co-presenting Mobile 2.0 and the Mobie Tech 4 Social Change camp) was with Brian Fling on the unlikely subject of email. We both agreed that we hate email (a common sentiment these days) and that something needed to be done. I don’t know a single person who actually doesn’t roll their eyes these days when the subject of email comes up. Kids these days already refer to email is “something I use when I want to communicate with old people.” Ouch! Email as a medium is not keeping up with how we interact, how we do our jobs, how we live in the modern world. It’s overtaken by spam (encouraged by its nature as an open and free medium and the relatively little it costs to send out emails in bulk). It has no intrinsic trust mechanism (and developments like sender policy framework are basically a band-aid and do not address personal trust circles, only whether an email is from where it purports to come from). Email has no intrinsic semantics that allow email clients to do anything useful with them. Even advanced email clients can do little to help with this mess. Email is actually follows a typical trajectory for innovation. In the book Why Things Bite Back, Edward Tenner takes us through a history of technological innovation and why some innovations have “unintended consequences.” The unintended consequences of Email have become all-to-clear: lost time, “inbox anxiety,” spam …