Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Email is dead.

Or rather it has simply atrophied but ironically due to over- rather than under-use. So sad to see folks still trying to make email do what they need it to do within so many corporations when facebook, twitter, blogs and a host of other media do a much better job of getting the message out and getting decisions made. The kids know and some smarter adults like Don Tapscott of ngenera know too. Unfortunately human face-to-face communication and the art of true meaningful conversation might be on its deathbed too.

THINK. What is the purpose of the emails you send? The underlying purpose?
  1. To communicate widely and poorly usually,
  2. to send attachments
  3. to create a record to refer back to,
  4. to let folks know what is going on or
  5. to ask what's going on

What else?

We have the newer, better, more timely, more direct, more useful technologies now that let us do all of the above in a much more human way...not stilted by structure...freedom to publish whatever and whenever you want and let the world filter it via profiles, filters, rss, tags and all the other meta-information out there,

THE FUTURE: Sending out ripples of what you specifically need and having that coming back to you in waves. Some would say that's here (I hear y'all, geeks! ;) but not in the true informational sense.

THE FUTURE + Not sending out anything but having a system match you with what you need based on what you do and deliver that to you.

THE FUTURE ++ Sending simple commands that live in an online OS that generate the systems that you will need in the future based on what EVERYBODY is doing...a twitter command line ;)

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