[wordup] Ross Mayfield: Email is dead

[Adam Shand]

In particular note the lengthy response by Bill Seitz in the comment 
section.

   Side Note: For a great example of Wiki technology check out
   Wiki Travel:

   http://www.wikitravel.org/
   http://www.wikitravel.org/article/One_month_in_Southeast_Asia

From: http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2003/08/email_is_dead.html

Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Wired has a good article on how Aggregators Attack Info Overload, a 
perfect excuse for me to go on a rant on how information overload will 
kill email lists within the short term.

I have posted at length on Blogging to Prevent Email Overload, 
Occupational Spam and how email should be a one-to-one medium.

Joi says email is officially broken because 17% of messages are rejected 
as spam. Never mind the false positives, the point is that your average 
F500 employee spends 3-4 hours per day using email, almost 50% of email 
is spam and 30% is occupational spam. Email volume is growing at 30% per 
year, invading our time and effectiveness. Email is no longer a 
productivity tool.

Kevin says the SoBig virus may be the last straw and We have to confront 
the reality: either email is broken, Microsoft's email software is 
broken, or those two statements are the same..

Commercial spam will not be solved by regulation or filters, trusted 
email networks that use challenge-response to confirm ties could be an 
interim solution at best. The only solution is changing economic 
incentives. Occupational spam cannot be solved by opt-in or opt-out 
techniques.

Email Lists have a rich history and many of value still remain. The 
first application that dramatically lowered the cost of group forming. 
But the reason email lists will be replaced by RSS and Pie/Atom/Echo is 
simple: cost.

Administering -- Administering email lists is a costy form of hell. 
Add/drop/policy/bugs/viruses all suck the time of administrators unless 
they buy very expensive tools. Chris Pirillo decided to move some of the 
more popular commercial lists to RSS becasue of the personal costs on 
his time.

Moderation -- Garbage in, garbage out -- unless there is a human check. 
Editorial functions don't scale efficiently and have coordination risks. 
Great moderators do create great lists, but only if the value they 
create is worth the cost of repetitive enforcement.

Reading -- Costs are twofold: time to read irrelevant messages and time 
dealing with subscripton management that has high search costs.

As email trends of volume and spam continue unabaited, these costs are 
compounded. Until recently there has not been an alternative. As 
consumers and enterprises adopt weblogs and aggregators a critical mass 
of users is already available in early adopter segments.

By contrast to Lists, Feeds are not opt-in or opt-out -- they are 
optional. In a decentralized structure, multiple Feeds in aggregate 
constitute an equivalent function to a List. Authors are Readers and as 
an Author has a choice to offer a Feed, as a Reader what to consume. We 
subscribe to people we trust not to waste our time. New Authors are 
revealed through social filtering (subscribed Authors referencing them). 
As Readers, they have the lowest transaction costs available for 
administering their consumption.

Decentralizing authorship, readership, administration and moderation 
pushes costs to the edge. This is made possible from a base of 
standards. Web nativity, an optional structure and social filtering 
process keeps spam out of trusted personal networks.

August 20, 2003 | Permalink