I agree, email is not dead... not even on life support, but it does have a bad case of the flu. Email is one of those systems where more volume decreases it's utility, and while it's very fair to pin that on Outlook, which because of it's dominance in enterprise use stunts development of alternative systems, it's also the fault of the entire industry. Gmail showed a new approach to email, but not substantially better, and some would argue that it's a knockoff of IBM's Remail service. Software providers, enterprise IT management, and ISPs were more concerned with managing email systems at the expense of improving them, so we are stuck with what we are stuck with today. Click the extended post for my wish list...
Link: The Rumors of Email's Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated, Part IV.
The Rumors of Email's Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated, Part IV
This one could also be entitled "What Are The Bloggers Smoking?"
Reports from last week's Blog Business Summit like this one are starting to filter in (pun slightly intended). This one gets a big yawn from me, even more so than the other times I've posted on this subject, here, here, and here. I'm as much of a blogger and a believer in blogs and RSS as the next guy -- maybe even more so -- but honestly, people, blogs are going to replace email?
I'd like to address a few critical points here head on, although a large part of me doesn't even want to dignify yet another empty "email is dead" quote with a response.
Basic error #1. The article seems to confuse blogs with RSS feeds. RSS feeds are data streams coming into an RSS reader application. Blogs
Here's what I want from email:
- better spam and spyware detection baked in, 100% effective with no false positives
- inline messaging... in other words, if I see something on a web page or doc that I want to email, let me add a header right there without opening a new window and send it
- instant messaging built into email as an alternative. Someone's online and I try to send them an email, open at IM window instead at my option.
- better support for file attachments, with indexing and searching of the attachments embedded in messages
- while I'm on attachments, if an email has a copy of an attachment in an earlier message, pull the old one and link to the newest copy (there was a company doing this called Attachstor)
- better searching, period. Integrated with desktop search, and p2p (like what Blinkx) is doing would be a bonus
- better mobile integration, take email with me everywhere
- integrated Web and RSS feed browsing
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