The future for standard email.. will it fade?

I was doing some laundry and thinking about how I have started using Facebook, twitter, and Ning to email or contact friends or colleagues even though I have their "Standard" email address. It made me wonder if that might be the future for email, that schools (or companies) would create a small network like NING or smaller version of Facebook and communicate that way instead of "old fashioned email" (maybe they already do and I just don't know it) It made me smile to try and think of a name for standard email, we call post mail "snail mail" what name could we give email? To add some pedegogy into the conversation, it reaffirms my belief that we have to teach kids how to learn and educate themselves. A tool we teach today (email, Microsoft Office, even blogs and wikis) might be gone tomorrow.

Tags: email, future, teaching

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Permalink Reply by pete whitfield on November 11, 2007 at 12:16pm

I sense that once you start to communicate with ning and facebook, email looks archaic and feels anti-social. Having conversations in the open (where appropriate!) is a much healthier communication system, as it invites collaboration, transparency and sharing. I wonder whether google's involvement with social networking will bring the sort of apps we see in facebook to ning? i certainly hope so - video messaging is top of my list as scan-reading of emails often leads to misinterpretation; the higher up the management chain, the less emails are properly read . You mention pedagogy Greg - yes indeed! We must teach learners to adapt to change, not to worship at the alter of existing software! Please do some more laundry - it must be good thinking time for you!

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Permalink Reply by Greg Noack on November 11, 2007 at 3:45pm

yes, open communication is great, but even for a private message I find myself sending mail through facebook before I open my gmail.

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Permalink Reply by Ian Grove-Stephensen on November 11, 2007 at 1:41pm

Here in England there is a deeply unhealthy obsession with teaching kids to use the software their parents were using five years ago. As you say, not just email - every school student can word process a pretty letter and print it out (onto paper - remember paper?). On Yacapaca you will find a thousand questions on where to find the font menu in Word, but narry a one on distributed intelligence, crowdsourcing or the meaning of 'small pieces, loosely joined'.

Of course, I celebrate all authoring in Yacapaca as a step in the right direction. I also accept that teachers have little choice about the curriculum they must teach. But I worry that we are using these beautiful, fantastic, joyous tools for learning, to turn out a generation of drones. Drones, what is more, with skills that are necessarily out of date by the time our kids reach the workforce.

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Permalink Reply by Ed Jones on November 11, 2007 at 6:15pm

Alas, I'm a terrible coder, so I'll won't be adding to the open source code base at Mozilla, but... here's what I want Thunderbird (my email client) to do:
1) Help me track blog discussions. Ning is good at notifying me (via email) of discussions I'm in, or follow, but many blogs are not.
2) Have a control panel for unsubscribing to a list or thread, or ignoring a particular source for awhile (never Classroom 2.0!), or for hiding all such notices for awhile.
3) A single button that says "Forward messages from people I know to my phone."
4) A still more improved calendar function, integrated with my browser, such that: an event posted on web any web page should have a type of link which the browser can interpret and offer the option of "add to my calendar".
5)Far better spam filtering.
6) Modes: a) show me everything you've got. b) I'm working; show me stuff from people I know. c) I'm really working, let messages from my top 10 list through otherwise keep quiet. d) I'm not working at all, friends and family only.

Twitter was interesting for a couple days in March, much of July and a wee bit of August. MySpace makes no sense to me. I've never seen a reason to get a Facebook account.

My email address book has 941 people in it.

However, I did hear of an interview with some 19 year old web business mogul who claimed the only use she could see for email is a formal invitation to a wedding or somesuch.

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Permalink Reply by Daniel Craig on November 11, 2007 at 8:47pm

Hi Greg,

I agree that these means of communication are shifting. You can see this in new iterations of email clients. For example, Outlook 2007 has support for RSS. However, the biggest use of standard email used in conjunction with social applications is with notifications. Most of my networks send me an email when someone has PM'ed me, responded to thread that I'm following, and so forth. This leads me to believe that even with the messeging options in services/application, you are still going to have the need for somesort of aggregation (I don't want to go to 10 places to check my messeges every day). With is sort of aggregation in place it is likely going to be like a next generation email client. When this happens, regardless of the technology underlying delivery of the messeges, it will be similar to what we experience as email today.

So, I agree that standard email as we know it will fade, however, I also see its replacement as not being substantially different.

Dan

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Permalink Reply by James Dykstra on November 11, 2007 at 9:08pm

I can't quite see us losing e-mail just yet.

1. If you're on Facebook and like to send messages and I'm on Ning and also like to send messages, we can't send messages to each other. It's like subscribing to a cellphone service that can only call people subscribed to the same company's service. It has some use, but it's limited.

2. Ultimately what you're doing when you send your Facebook messages is e-mailing. Sure, you're e-mailing within Facebook, but it's still e-mail.

Years ago I had an account with an online service called GEnie. I could e-mail my friend within the service, but mailing my cousin who had an account at a university was next to impossible. When I got full e-mail access I was really glad because now I could contact everyone. I'm not willing to go back and contact only the people on one service whether that's MySpace, Facebook or Ning. it's a step backwards.

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Permalink Reply by Greg Noack on November 12, 2007 at 2:26pm

I have found that using the different services helps me organize my life. I Facebook with family and friends, and ning and twitter I use to keep in contact with professional colleagues. I of course still use standard email and have a purpose for it, such as online orders and banking. When I first started using web2.0 I was completely overwhelmed with all the different ways to do the same thing. My life just sort of sorted itself out. I would mention that being able to communicate between platforms, such as email between ning and facebook is probably not impossible, just that no one has written a facebook application for it.