The problem with email
Mathew Ingram has the issues with email down:
Obviously, my daughters won’t be teenagers forever. Eventually they will (I sincerely hope) get jobs and become productive members of society — at which point they will no doubt be forced to deal with the massive time-sucking drain on productivity that we call email. They too will get to enjoy the main feature of email: what some like to call an “audit trail” and others like to describe as “butt-covering.”
Let’s face it: by CC’ing everyone under the sun, sending long messages late on a Friday afternoon, including miscellaneous attachments for no reason and otherwise gumming things up, certain people achieve the appearance of work without actually having to do any -- and then when someone calls them on it they can say “but didn’t you get my email?” If Google or someone else can fix that , then more power to them.
Yeah, I have that experience with my daughter as well. The last time I saw her mouse cycle over mail.app on the Mac Mini, the red "unread messages" count was well over 100. She's mostly in IM, or specific web forums - email is simply not something she deals with on a regular basis.
I suspect email is the dead letter office for the next generation.
Comments
are email and IM that different ?
[Yann Monclair] November 15, 2007 21:22:26.982
When I started using emails, I used it as a quick way of getting to people, as opposed to sending a snail-mail (aka a post letter). Now, I would use IM if I want to contact someone quickly, over email if it's not a rush - paper letters is only for annoying administrations and official paperwork (are these really different?) - . Ironically one of my requirements for an IM client is logging of my conversations, for future reference (because my memory doesn't always serve me as well as I'd like to). This is something Google offers, by storing your googletalk chats in your gmail.
So how different from email is IM ?