Is email in Danger?

Read/Write Web hypothesises that email is in trouble over here:

Email is fundamentally great at substantial person-to-person communication. The following diagram illustrates why email is facing competition. It cannot effectively support broadcast (except for spam) and it's still poor at helping with tasks and projects.

Tools like Basecamp and Highrise from 37Signals are showing there's a way to better project management and CRM while leveraging information in emails. If the Twitter service stabilises it's likely to win over people permanently because of its simplicity and playfulness.

Social networks incorporate direct messaging and chats, making it easy for people to talk directly, bypassing email. These communications are easier than email; they're integrated into the flow and more accessible. To be fair, they're aimed for brief messages.

The increasing speed of our lives and global connectivity reduces the need for lengthy emails. If we're in touch more often, then we reveal less every time we talk. Shorter, more frequent exchanges are replacing the lengthier communication of the past.

There is a 2x2 matrix used to bolster the argument that appears to have no axes and in my view is wrong, and thus leads to the (in my opinion) incorrect conclusions above. To compare email with project management software is not comparing like with like, but the others are worth examining. Here is my matrix to (hopefully) explain things better:



Once we used email to do nearly all these roles, then along came the Web and took over the broadcasting role, IM took over 1-1 fast conversation, Wikis were better highly modifiable collaborative ware and latterly microblogs have started to do the low grade broadcast role.

These other approaches in the diagram are most effective at their outer corners - the main issue as I see it is that email can do most of the tasks that the other approaches do, but is not optimised for any one of them. Thus what we see as the "failure" is more the rolling back of a an early technology from places it was at best a "make do".

Also, because of its age it is more spammed than the later systems - as they become ubiquitous they too will attract spam, but most people don't realise that.

The problem all the other systems have is as they move off their outer corners they too start to look less useful than email in its home turf of the middle ground, and as they become more spammed they will feel the same frictions. Also, email browsers have not really had many "web 2.0" upgrades - no picture avatars etc - and I am sure these revamps will make it "feel" more modern. In fact it amuses me to note that as Twitter, IM etc add more manipulable functions they start looking more like email systems, and as blogs and broadcast websites become more interactive they start to look more like email groupware.

The other thing that is important about email, that is not yet hitting the headlines, is that the directory is yours and its private, whereas in many of these other systems, someone else owns the social network. This we believe will become a bigger and bigger issue as privacy abuse and spam through these more "social" media increases.

Update - nice graphic by Zoli Erdos looking at the various comms techs from the synch / asynch and functionality point of view - same conclusion.