John Martellaro The emergence of Twitter has everyone talking. And, of course, talk is cheap unless one makes a strong point. These days, I see a lot of talk about e-mail dying, supplanted by Twitter. Here's why it isn't going to happen.
Those who know me know that I like to make points by synthesizing disparate ideas, not by making bold, emotional claims. The truth is almost always deeper, more complex, and bound by competing considerations than a simplistic move by everyone.
Physicists like to talk about the probability, calculated by Statistical Mechanics, of all the air in a room moving to one side and suffocating the inhabitants. It can happen, but the probability is such that it's unlikely to happen or have ever happened in the lifetime of the universe. Similarly, the probability of everyone abandoning e-mail and moving solely to Twitter is also remote.
On Thursday, Loren McDonald wrote, from an e-mail marketer's perspective: "Because so much personal communication is happening on social networks now, what's left in the inbox is commercial messages, social-network notifications, time-sensitive alerts like payment-due requests or appointment reminders, and, of course, a bit of spam."
I think that's right on. What e-mail did well in some limited sense, Twitter does better and faster. (No Spam.) What e-mail is still good at is the things listed above, and so, its texture as a communication medium will change.
In addition, e-mail is 30 years old, and Twitter is about two years old. Twitter may change a lot in the next few years as the hype drives it in new directions with new capabilities. Of course, duplicating e-mail is not one of the features needed in Twitter, so we can expect to see e-mail continue to be used for certain purposes.
In a sense, Twitter cures the Spam problem of e-mail, speeds up communication, and socializes us better. It's essentially the idea of a New Internet (free from Spammers) implemented instead as a new technology on the Old Internet. With that kind of creativity, we can expect to see Twitter grow enormously, but in its founder's and the community's desire to cash in, also suffer problems that we haven't yet foreseen.
E-mail will continue to thrive as a result, also morphing into something that complements Twitter and Twitter's descendants. The net result is that life won't get simpler, it'll just get more complex.
Time to buy a bigger display.
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I just submitted my monthly expenses to my company. A spreadsheet, a PDF snapshot of another spreadsheet, and a multipage PDF of all my receipts. Over 3Mb of data. Could you do that with Twitter? How about two years from now when they audit and want to see all my correspondence. Will Twitter be backed up on our server? For that matter we send data interoffice via e-mail on a secure network. Is the data on Twitter secure?
Twitter will continue but it just does not do what me and my business need. E-mail will continue for the foreseeable future because it does do what we need.
/OT
John a couple of weeks ago we corresponded about Twitter. I was going to give it a try. Well I did. This morning I deleted the client because I found it utterly useless. I subscribed to TMO and found it duplicated my existing RSS feeds. My company does not use it because of the above mentioned lack of a permanent record. Lastly I looked around and quickly realized that I really don’t want to hear anyone’s stream of consciousness thoughts. If it’s important enough for me to give a **** about, put it in an article or at least a blog. Otherwise I have too many things going by me in a given day to care.
So you all have fun, but not all of us are as enamored with Twitter as you folks at TMO seem to be. It is another tool, but for me it’s like handing a scalpel to a carpenter. Twitter just doesn’t do anything I need.