Accept no substitutes

Category: #noemail (Page 10 of 10)

Email to Paper Mail: Novel in 1988

According to the UNC-Chapel Hill Computing History site and my own memory, UNC-Chapel Hill had a mad idea — everyone on campus would be reachable by email, even if they didn’t own a computer. My own position was that if someone wanted to use email as their preferred means of communication, it should be made as easy of possible to include addresses that would act as gateways to several distribution means — Internet, Bitnet, paper and even fax (something that my pal Carl Malamud would make real in a very broad way in a 1993 Request For Comments).

But how to make it happen?

Toby Considine then of UNC Facilities and the Mail Services and I dreamed up a way to place a small printer in the campus postal and interoffice distribution center. One could send email to conventional email addresses and with no extra effort to the printer for those who were computerless. My software would look up a physical address to match the “paper email” address and format the message for printing on NCR paper that included a little window thru which the physical address needed to deliver the message but not the message itself could be read. The paper email messages would then be taken off the printer and put in the regular mail distribution flow.

It mostly worked. One time someone, perhaps in my own office (but not me), routed an entire mainframe memory dump to a paper mail address. Luckily the alert mail room guys shut off the printer and called me. I killed the message and all was well.

December 1988: Everyone on campus has an email userid. Mail sent to an assigned userid is printed and delivered to the recipient’s office

Eventually paper email vanished. Everyone had email addresses. But there is some kind of lesson here not just for email and cobbled together network gateways and the urge to get broader solutions to communication needs.

Now if the #noemail project can find a good way to integrate the existing and emerging services that I use to manage my activity streams and interact with others, we will have learned something. I have a feeling that this will be an ongoing project of discovery and appropriation — rather than outright invention.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg sez “Email is dead”

In June 2010, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg spoke at the Nielsen Consumer 360 conference. Her message: “Email is dead!” Her answer unsurprisingly: Facebook is the future. Facebook rules. You will use Facebook.

I’ve seen too many platforms deform and decompose too quickly to say that Facebook has all the answers or could ever achieve implementation of the answers that they do have, but I do believe that Sandberg is on the right track (since it’s the same track that I’m on myself). Worth a view — and worth the panic and the anger in the comments ;->

Strong Bad’s Dream Email

I’d had a full day of meetings, Face to Face, with people yesterday and so did no email. One of my colleagues Skyped me to say let’s go to the Bull game and so I spent the evening without email as well.

Strong Bad uses technology (mostly email)

Strong Bad uses technology (mostly email)

Then I went to sleep. In my dreams, my favorite email reading entertainer appeared — Strong Bad from Homestarrunner. I can’t remember the dream, but here (sorry I can’t embed) is Strong Bad receiving his dream email.

Breaking free: Yammer announces embeddable activity streams

Stealing the headline completely from Matt Lynley of Venture Beat (and one of my former students) to point to the growth and changes in Yammer as it moves toward a comprehensive activity streams service.

Yammer is doing exactly what I’ve been talking about in moving beyond email and integrating services and activities in a more effective way. I haven’t used Yammer in a while, but it looks like time to revisit it.

One downside for me and the #noemail project is that Yammer is designed for intranets. Great for companies, as is Lotus Connections, but I want to try working in public and in the wild.

Matt writes about the new embed feature:

The feature functions similar to the way YouTube users embed videos on other websites. It’s a few lines of code that fit snugly into an HTML or JavaScript code. The site then calls out to Yammer to pick up any information about a specific feed and publishes it into a widget built into the website. The feed works both ways, too — any information entered into the widget is sent back to the main Yammer website.

Fred Wilson and Friends say email is the secret sauce, but

VC in NYC, Union Square Ventures principal Fred Wilson has some astute things to say about email and its interaction with more social — and I would say more appropriate and efficient — technologies. He even asks an expert what he thinks. The expert though is Matt Blumberg, Return Path’s founder and CEO. Return Path is a portfolio company of Union Square and according to Fred “the category creator and market leader in email deliverability.” The comments tell you why I don’t want to use email anymore — they are all from attaboy marketers talking about how they get you to read their email and accept their newsletters.

Fred Wilson

Fred Wilson

Fred ends with:

I do think the rise of alternative notification channels; sms, mobile push notifications, direct messages on twitter, facebook messaging, etc are going to move some of this kind of thing off of email over time. But today, if you want to drive retention and repeat usage, there isn’t a better way to do it than email.

Reminds me of an Emo Philips quote I love:

I used to think my brain was the most important organ in my body until I realized what was telling me this.

Don Knuth beat me to email divesting, but…

Donald E. Knuth

Donald E. Knuth

In early 1990, programming hero and influential textbook author (“The Art of Computer Programming” in more or less four volumes so far), Donald Knuth wrote:

I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don’t have time for such study.

I’ve only been using something like email since 1977, but I stayed with it longer all the time hoping for improvements. The promised improvements didn’t come from email really; more from the various email interfaces the best of which are still attempting to integrate “Activity Streams” and variously named productivity flows into the desktop in some meaningful manner. The first mistake is focusing on the desktop and on work.

Just as Xerox focused on a personal computer while — as Malcom Gladwell notices (behind a paywall at New Yorker) — Apple focused on a popular and affordable computer, email integration needs to so to where people both play and work, where they have family, friends and co-workers in some customizable way. And that means the most personal interfaces yet known — those on mobile devices.

In the meantime, I’m exploring other options with your help. When you or others contact me and where will help me decide where to put my communications energies and time.

Unlike Knuth, who handily handed off his email tasks to his secretary as he declared email abandonment, I’m divesting and looking for better, more efficient options.

IBM seeks to integrate email and social actions as “Activity Stream”

Writing on his Portals and KM blog, Bill Ives reports on IBM’s vision of making email actually useful in “IBM Covers the Transformation of Busines Email”.

A couple of key paragraphs to whet your interest:

Email is becoming more focused. Ed [Brill, IBM’s new leader for social collaboration] said that his own email volume has actually decreased in the era of other social tools. File sharing, for example, has moved to these social tools. However, the email he gets more often requires an action on his part. The concept of an activity stream is getting a lot of play these days. This capability had its origins with micro-blogging when auto-generated updates made an appearance. Email can serve this same function. Ed said that the activity stream, regardless of location, will evolve beyond simple alerts. It will allow for direct actions. For example a request for vacation can be approved right in the message with one click, rather than requiring opening another app. REST APIs allow for this capability and it will be a big productivity booster.

Ed said that IBM is working to embed these actions within email. It is also working to apply analytics to email traffic to determine what might be useful to users. For example, it could let users know who should they talk to about certain issues based on email traffic. They are also working to make the activity stream more pervasive, as well as more connected to other apps. SAP is one example, of this increased connection.

My own take on this is that the activity stream already pretty much exists in a variety of ways — all of which I’m still going to use after June 1’s divesture from email — all of which are more effective than email. Ed and Bill point to file sharing as an example. One thing that’s bigger here is that a kind of intelligent use of analytics to determine which actions are best handled where is called for or predicted or being pre-pitched. A lot of that exists already in Gmail and even iPhone mail: great spam filtering, great sensing of Priority, adding links that might be dates and so could be moved to calendars easily, gTalk and on Facebook chat and message integration, etc. Tripit can scan your inbox and build your travel itinerary — and it does a great job.

I’d like it if I never saw my inbox at all (as I plan to try out), but by analytics or by human redirection that actions, requests and services end up at the right places where they can be handled more efficiently.

Orlean’s Communications Fatigue and Bang!Bang!Bang!

The Orchid Thief
Orchid Thief author and New Yorker writer, Susan Orlean, can’t schedule a dinner with Buster and blames too many channels of communications ending with “Since when was communication so exhausting?”

I’ve got no problem with the number of choices for doing different things. I only want to divest in the least efficient and most annoying channels — starting with email.

email has always been a Rube Goldberg operation. In the early days of Usenet and UUCP — before BITNET or a well-connected ARPAnet, sysadmins had to collect and share tables not just of known hosts but also of known routes. If you didn’t know a good route to another computer on the net or had a slack sysadmin, you were stuck. If you did know and perhaps knew better than your sysadmin, you could explicitly specify the route of your mail in the address by means of Bangs! aka !. Here’s an example of such an explicit route address from Wikipedia:

hubhost!middlehost!edgehost!user@uucpgateway.somedomain.example.com

In earlier days, there would be no example.com — in fact no .com at all. Those were a simpler and for some a happier time. Not for me! I’m ready to move on from email!!! email has been too banged up for too long.

My intro to computer messaging

When I arrived at the University of North Carolina in 1977, I had had no experience at all with computer messaging systems. In fact the term “email” wasn’t invented yet. 1977 was the year that the first of the RFCs regarding email was issued (RFC733 – “Standard for the format of ARPA network text messages”). Although the Computer Science Department was nearby, those of us working on the IBM 360/75 had to be content with a non-networked mainframe and its primitive time-sharing system CALLOS which called nothing much but allowed for some simple messaging and light weight programming. CS would soon be using UUCP (The Unix to Unix Copy Program or occasionally and more properly Protocol) developed by Mike Lesk, but for the moment even their email was mostly on the same computers. Usenet’s invention was only a few years off (2 or 3), but CALLOS was about as good as one could hope for — if one’s hope weren’t too high.

Somehow I managed to get to share responsibility for CALLOS with Martin Feinstein and tried my hand at a few scripts that I used to create games which were more like question answerers than games. I never got very far but I was heavily influenced by the folks I saw obsessively playing “Adventure” aka “Adventure Cave” on the teletype machines. Nothing on CALLOS could approach the complex Fortran-based Adventure with its dwarves, canaries, dragons and the secret word passed on from player to player – “XYZZY” .

Years, not so many years, later a City Planning student, Howard Cherniak, who had completed the Adventure give me a printout of the Fortan code. I have no idea where it is now nor do I know what became of Howard. Perhaps he has returned to the edge of a dark forest typing downstream and hoping to rejoin the cheering band of friendly elves.

The Kids are Right Alright; email is next to useless

More that one study, more that one observer, more than one predictor has noticed that teens as early as 2005 were abandoning email. Chad Lorenz writing in Slate spent some serious time in anecdotage whilst writing his article, The Death of E-Mail
Teenagers are abandoning their Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts. Do the rest of us have to?
back in 2007, but he also cites some of the early Pew studies on teens and email.

Lorenz would be even more pessimistic about email if he could have leapt to the future and read this 2010 report on teens and their communication choices.

Also worth reading and following The Pew Millennials Project. which is ongoing. And fun to take the “How Millennial are You?” quiz.

Teens and communication choices

The M$FT view of email – Past, Present and Future.

Whilst this report reported on at Mashable is done by an independent research group commissioned by Microsoft, the resulting graphics completely overstate the importance of Outlook and of Microsoft in the creation of email culture and use. M$FT was very very late to the party and Outlook continues to fail to play well with most standards due in large part to a creative misreading of the RFCs and a continuing impulse to embrace and extend the protocols. Not that M$FT hasn’t contributed to my own decision to quit email despite the perceptions, reported here, that email is so essential that it cannot be abandoned.

Brief Opts Out of Emails

Most folks leaving email do it as a kind of a stunt as Peter Bauer of Mimecast did in 2008 for one week at the behest of the Financial Times.

These result in little vignettes and sketches of withdrawal and envy of others still using email (or chocolate or coffee or whatever has been given up). But one week? That’s hardy a change. Lent is longer that than (40 days if you are unaware).

And these experiments such as they are don’t offer attempts are an advanced replacement of any kind. If there is any substitution, it’s usually backwards looking — paper, phone, fax — fercrissake fax! — or face to face as if that were the only alternative.

Not what I’m after at all. I’m looking to see how folks will sort out the various richer and more appropriate communications options offered online and off in the absence of email.

Tyranny of Email – John Freeman

I see John Freeman (not a nom de guerre de email) is more of a rejectionist than an alternativist like Luis Suarez, but Freeman does have some points I agree with. I’m afraid that Freeman, given the answers in the question section, looks back to better times; Suarez and I look forward to better solutions.

John Freeman talks about The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four Thousand Year Journey to Your Inbox.

The former president of the National Book Critics Circle and current American Editor of Granta, gives us a history of people’s need for correspondence. He examines the astonishing growth of e-mail — how it is changing lives, and not always for the better.

Learning from Luis of Living in a World Without Email

Luis Suarez

Luis Suarez

Luis Suarez, IBM Social Media evangelist, has been living in a world without email for three years. He presented a bit about what he learned — so far — from his experience as a mind map called “Email is where Knowledge Goes to Die”. I’ve learned a lot from @elsua already and so far am following in his steps closely even tho I had no idea of his good preceding work before yesterday.

There are a few differences between Luis and myself. Luis has been living in a world without corporate email; I’ll be trying something broader. Luis has some integrated IBM tools, like Lotus Connections, to rely on as alternative communications; I’ll be using only those openly accessible to anyone on the open internet. Luis hasn’t really spent most of his adult life developing and using email; I started with a proto-email system in 1977 (more on my own experience developing email, BITNET, and the Internet in later posts).

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