Microblogging Will Marginalize Corporate Email

http://bhc3.wordpress.com/2009/03/13/microblogging-will-marginalize-corporate-email/

by crocus • 17 years ago

17 16 17 years ago

bhc3.wordpress.com

tdavis4• 17 years ago

Look at the Yammer feature list; microblogging isn't marginalizing email, it is pretending to be email.

  Behind the firewall installation: Yes.
  Public notes: Mailing list.
  @replies: Reply.
  DMs: Standard email.
  Groups: Mailing list.
  Private groups: Mailing list.
  File attachments: Duh.
  Favorites (a form of bookmarking): Flag.
  Tagging: Filters.
  Conversation threading: Standard.
  Unlimited character length: Email started this fad!
  Search: Duh.

This begs the question, What the hell is the point?! Email already does email pretty well and is much more familiar to people (especially the old crusty decision makers) so why choose anything else?

unalone2• 17 years ago

It's centralized? That's all I can think of. To be honest, I can't imagine somebody wanting to use Yammer.

    Unlimited character length: Email started this fad!

Ah, the joy of aggressive feature promotion.

m0nty• 17 years ago

I think many of these articles come down to one thing: microblogging services need to monetize, fast.

chiffonade• 17 years ago

> This begs the question, What the hell is the point?!

It raises the question. Begging the question means something else. Look it up.

tdavis4• 17 years ago

I feel so very ashamed, being a complete grammar nazi. I guess I just never use that phrase.

bcneige• 17 years ago

Bah, you know what he meant.

pg• 17 years ago

What's new about twitter is that you don't specify the recipients. That is a real difference, and the right thing for some kinds of messages currently sent by email.

unalone2• 17 years ago

That's true for Twitter, but not of Yammer, which is essentially a glorified mailing list. (Is there anything else that the Yammer model offers over email? If so, I'm not seeing it at cursory glance.)

tdavis4• 17 years ago

I don't specify the recipients when I send an email to a mailing list. It goes to whoever is subscribed to the list, similar to how twitter messages go to the users who are following the person sending (or how it would go to a "group" in Yammer).

Then you might say, "But there is also a public feed of all the tweets" to which I would reply, "There are plenty of public interfaces to mailing lists". Gmane is essentially twitter if everyone used tags and tweets were actually given context in the larger conversations they create. And there was a lot less worthless noise.

There is nothing new here. Basically, Twitter just took away the ability to specify a group of recipients when sending an email, limited the character count, removed file attachments, etc.; Yammer put those features back. I hope Yammer becomes super popular because eventually someone else will then notice, hey, we're essentially using email again!

bhc3• 17 years ago

I see this question a lot...why microblogging? Why not just stick with email?

As twitter has shown, there's value in the posting of notes about what you're observing, reading, thinking. I like to think of it as messaging without guilt. Email, IM have a certain social expectation, microblogging doesn't. I like the way Alan Lepofsky put it: "Email is 'reply hoped for'. Instant messaging is 'reply expected'. Social messaging/microblogging is 'reply optional' (http://bit.ly/dm03).

The principle here is that people are so much more than the jokes they email, and the requests they send to one another. There's a whole lot of smarts people have that do not have a channel. And organizations are the poorer for not providing a way for employees to contribute these things they know and dream up.

Once this notion of commenting without guilt takes hold, a lot of what employees express becomes conversational material. And where will that happen? Likely within the microblogging app, not email.

tdavis4• 17 years ago

I think you paint an overly-rosy picture of the usefulness of microblogging. There may be value in the posting of these minor notes -- people in general seem to be narcissistic enough to confirm that -- but I have yet to find much value in reading them.

I used Twitter for about 8 months and during that time I don't think I read a single valuable tweet that didn't contain information that I shortly found through some other channel. Most tweets were pure noise. What was worse is that I joined in with the noise and I am not the sort of person to broadcast what I know to be irrelevant information. Suddenly because everyone was wasting my time, it was okay for me to waste theirs.

Yes, microblogging may be increasing commenting, but those comments are largely noise; most people can only cite specific instances, usually revolving around real-time events, where Twitter was of any real use to anybody. There is a cognitive cost to reading all those tweets, not to mention a time cost, and I found that those costs far outweighed any perceived benefit in almost all cases. With a mere 140 characters to convey information, it seems like this would be the case of the majority of the time.

Microblogging takes the friction and guilt out of speaking (essentially), which I think is bad. You should think before you write or speak. You should ask yourself, "Is this information of significant use to a majority of those who will be subjected to it?"

giardini• 17 years ago

And why not NNTP? Newsgroups offer all the listed features and NNTP is a mature protocol.

The only barrier is user infamiliarity with newsreaders. But newsgroups are close enough to e-mail that there should be plenty of carryover.

thwarted• 17 years ago

There already is carryover, many email clients are also newsreaders and speak NNTP.

jwilliams• 17 years ago

Email already does email pretty well and is much more familiar to people (especially the old crusty decision makers)

Not sure where you've worked, but corporate email is horribly broken. Those crusty old decision makers are getting hundreds and hundreds of emails a day and would like a reprieve.

Microblogging Will Marginalize Corporate Email

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