Email as messaging system

I ran into Sachin Agarwal's blog about how email is the de-facto standard messaging system of Internet.  I totally agree.  Email is a very simple tool that everyone understands.  Although I hate using email as collaboration tool, email has its killer use case, and it is here to stay.

I can think of the following compelling reasons why email is not going away.

Motivated reasoning

In the context of the psychological theory of motivated reasoning, this makes a great deal of sense. Based on pretty indisputable observations about how the brain works, the theory notes that people feel first, and think second. The emotions come faster than the “rational” thoughts—and also shape the retrieval of those thoughts from memory.
- Chris Mooney @Mother Jones

Motivated reasoning is a term that describes how our emotions shape the way we think about things, even before we have chance to rationalize about them.  It's a fancy way of saying that we feel first then look for a reason to back up our feeling.  Great marketers know this, and have been using it to market us things that we don't really need.  By making us feel certain way, we are not rationalizing why we need to buy things.  Instead we feel that we have to get it.

Communication != Exchange of information

"Communication is a learned skill...  They [people] are mistaking exchange of information for communication." 

- Richard the caller to KQED Forum

Last week KQED Forum had 1-hour segment discussing online dating culture.  During the call, one caller named Richard called in and made the above comment.  It was in the context of how communication tends to happen over electronic medium, and that is not necessarily the same as communicating with people in face-to-face meeting.  The caller was suggesting that there are who aspects of communication that we don't think about too much these days, and we need to practice to get better at it.

It gave me a pause.  Communication as exchange of information sounds logical, yet it feels like there are some things missing.  What could be missing?

Communication Paradox

Here's something to think about.

We have been going at turning everyone on social network into publishers.  Anyone with fingers to type up their whereabouts or what they are about to eat can share their status with everyone else who care to subscribe to their updates.  Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Foursquare, Google+, Branch, Tumblr, Quora, etc., we have more social networks than we care to remember.

What is ironic is that as we become more connected and instantly reachable, I am finding that it is increasingly difficult to communicate with people.  I have more ways to reach my friend than I can count with my ten fingers.  Yet it is becoming challenging to have a dialogue with him.

Of course, if you are not interested in communicating,
you have a whole new problem...

Why I Believe Social Network Is Future Of Communication Platform

I was having lunch with my coworkers yesterday and talking about some websites that were still using static HTML to render their content. While describing them, I said they looked like they were from 1990's. Then I quickly realized that it was only 1995 when Netscape popularized websites, and most websites were developed after 1996. That was just 16 years ago.

Since the birth of graphical world wide web technology to allow people to communicate each other and share information have been evolving in dizzying pace. Pagers have been replaced by mobile phones, mobile phones by Blackberries and Blackberries by touch-screen iPhones. Email which quickly became de-facto electronic communication standard evolved to become webmail, then mobile messaging, and recently to microblog messages called tweets.

Abusing the power of email to the max;
how many of these group emails do you get a day?
(Don't worry, I know better not to send this particular one,
but I've done my own share of group replies)

But businesses still rely on face-to-face meetings, phone calls, conference calls, and emails to get our work done. As most of US economy has shifted to service industry, most of us derive our value from communicating or collaborating with other workers. Although some rock star programmers might be reluctant to admit, we spend our better part of day communicating and collaborating, not coding.

It's safe to say that most businesses would come to its knees if mail server is down and emails do not get delivered. We've become so dependent on email for almost all communication activity that we do, it's fair to say that our day revolves around email.

The problem of email is that it's meant to be private exchange of information between two parties. It's built using postal service analogy. There is a sender and there is a recipient. Message travels from one person to another. The message is not public, and is not meant for sharing with other people. In fact sending too many mails and asking them to reshare is prohibited by law (chain letter anyone?). Well, same applies to email.

It's Not About Content; It's All About Communication

Google is all about content; Facebook is all about communication.

- Kailash Ambwani CEO of FaceTime Communications

Today I want to share a few articles that I found over last month or so. All these articles talk about non-intuitive observation. They all point to importance of communication, and how enabling communication is really the key to harness the explosive network effect of social network. Contrary to popular belief, they all talk about content, as we know them, is not the king.