I get a lot of email everyday. In fact I get enough that I can actually gauge how the American workforce is doing based on the flow and quantity. For example, one Friday afternoons, the velocity of email drops in half. On Sunday nights, my email lights up. I find both of these trends interesting. Yet that is not the point of this post… I like email. I don’t have spam problems and people generally only send me valuable communications. I do everything I can to keep it that way. I have come to love sitting down to look at 20 or 30 emails that come in over a couple hours because there are always interesting pieces of information, requests, or comments in the “pile.” I am not addicted to email, I just love the efficiency of this form of communication. There is now a new trend in social technologies that is screwing up my beloved email and I want companies to stop doing it.
I am experiencing more and more people using Twitter (direct tweets), LinkedIn, and Facebook to send me direct messages. While I appreciated anyone connecting with me to talk, I am getting really annoyed at having to open a new application from my email just to answer what used to be sent to me through POP3 mail. I might get ten or twelve contacts a day now through these three services and that requires me to jump out of my email client to get to them. Just imagine if this trend continues? What if there are a few other social networking sites that get hot and I am forced to open six different clients just to respond to people? What is really broken is that I can post to Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook all from Tweetdeck in one click, but when people answer or comment, I have to open three different clients to respond back. That is sick and twisted.
Why don’t these companies just allow someone to post a message from within their services, but deliver to the recipients email? Is it really that they are trying to force people to stay in their environments? Could they be that petty? Clearly they have to know that it is a drag to have to open their sites just to respond to a communication that hits my email, but has a noreply address on the contact. I really think that we, the user base, need to stand up and call for some sanity from these platform providers. Email is a universal tool that really works pretty darn well. Let’s keep that standard for text-based communication that does not have to be instant. Let’s not try to create ten different standards for how we contact each other electronically.
While I am on the email subject, I have to say this… Why the heck is there not a Xobni like product for the Mac? And why has it taken email providers so long to build in analytics into the email platform? Wouldn’t it be nice to know who the top ten people are that you receive emails from? And how long you spend typing emails a day? What about analytics like the average time to return emails, or the average time it takes people to return mine? What about alerts that if flagged, could tell me if an email I sent was ever returned? I could go on with the basic functionality that would be nice from email providers. You know, we think the software we run is pretty handy, but in truth, it has a long way to go to be really as functional as it should be.
Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com