Jan 14, 2011

Why can't we all just get along?

I shouldn't be surprised by this comment coming from someone who considers communication in a broadcasting framework but I have to react to the comments that e-mail is "not great for communication" bit. It's not great for broadcast communication or even short messaging (like IM), but it is a perfectly wonderful tool for secure communication of rich content (i.e., more than 140 characters) that is more directed to the needs of the recipients.

Email, Dorsey explained, '[is] not great for communication because it's not focused on the most important thing. The subject is the message, and that's the message. The subject is in the message in the IM. It's bringing the content to you right away.
Sometimes the subject is not the most important thing - except maybe when it has NSFW in it - but subjects like "Talking Points for Today's Meeting" don't communicate the important stuff and I'd really hate to get that info in via IM.

I'm still amazed by the denizens of Web 2.0's urge to kill e-mail. Why? It makes no sense. All information and communication is not meant to be broadcast and shared with the world (this blog post is not one of those cases). Even IM is directed to specific individuals and tends to be pretty private. So why can't we have it all?

Twitter Co-Founder Jack Dorsey On The Power Of Tweets

3 comments:

Bob Balfe said...

Dead on Karen!

Jerry Carter said...

I wrote 7 years ago that IM would overtake and supplant email. I'm glad I was wrong and the error in my thinking then was that one size fits all, or rather failing to realize what you arep pointing out. Twitter is not the same as a blog, for example, because a blog tends to have more in-depth medium. A Post card is not a letter home for the same reason.

There is then one obvious reason for the powers that be to try to kill email: they desperately feel the need to remain relevant.

Jake said...

I find myself using threadsy more and more to meld IM, Social Networking and email into a synergistic whole. My solemn wish is that Mozilla would dust off Thunderbird and make it work more like threadsy. The meme is out there with Outlook's social network connector and other paid add-ons and Rapportive kinda works