So I'll be the first to admit that I have
my biases, but when the Stowe Boyd, the moderator of "The Future of Email" panel argued that...
- Email is bad because you can send it to anyone
- Email is bad because it's asynchronous
I started to worry that I had slipped into some alternate universe where email isn't the killer app, and where those weren't the two primary benefits of the medium.
Well, that's sorta what I said. I said (see Email Blows) that email is not particularly good at many of the things we use it for, and that it is a lowest common denominator approach. I think the IM model is better in many ways, and believe that email will have to adopt much or all of what IM does.
By the way, Esther Dyson made a number of great points from the floor. She pointed out that we need to break out the various communications capabilities -- like RSS reading and publishing, synchronous and asynchronous communications, calendaring -- that currently are lumped into the email inbox. People should be able to mix and match these independently of each other, and just pushing everything into one big mess in Outlook or a portal is not a "solution" to the email problem, as several of the panelists seemed to argue.
Now me, I want to burn the email inbox down, but that's exactly the kind of anti-social behavior that got me into trouble yesterday.
