email is efail
Tantek Çelik one of the developers of Technorati wrote a nice post about the waning usefulness of email. Here are a few highlights.
“Point to point communications do not scale.
All forms of communication where you have to expend time and energy on communicating with a specific person (anything that has a notion of “To” in the interface that you have to fill in) are doomed to fail at some limit.”
He goes on to talk about 1-to-many communications, and their importance. 1-to-1 still has importance, but the more transparent you can make your communication, the better…
“Emails tend to be bloated with too many details and different topics.
Email requires more of an interface cognitive load tax than IM (as compared to the time spent on writing the content itself), thus people naturally put much more into an email (perhaps in an unconscious effort to amortize that interface tax overhead across more content).”
Limits are good. Give people a giant canvas, and they will surely fill it up.
It’s true. email is a broken tool for group communication. And if you’re not working out ways to communicate with groups of individuals in singular ways, your message is not being received and multiplied the way it ought to be.
