Is E-mail Dead?

[J Guidosh]

Dr. Alam and I wanted to share a discussion we had over gmail the past few days. It's pretty interesting, and I'd really like to hear some other opinions on the matter. I started this off with myself, and each reply posted below is an answering e-mail to the post above it.
__________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Alam,

I received the appropriate e-mails, I was having trouble accessing Google Docs from my Yahoo account. I'm guessing it was a fluke seeing as I can open other Google Docs from Yahoo now.

Thanks for the help,

Jake

[J Guidosh]

Jacob

You need to keep two things in mind.

1. Yahoo has been acting flaky lately. That is one of the reason I stopped using it because they were either losing e-mails or they were putting them into spam folder. Some students end up submitting LU's several times before we figure out what was going on. Especially if there was a file attachment and posting was made through e-mail instead of post command on the board itself.

2. Yahoo and google are competing in the same space for the same ad dollars. I will not be surprised if Yahoo e-mail does not support google doc 100 percent. That was one of the reasons I asked all of you to switch to gmail because google docs are integrated with gamil and there are many features that are enabled if you are using gmail with google doc

I noticed that you have a gmail account and I added it at the bottom of the spreadsheet hoping that you will drop the Yahoo one and use the gmail I am circulating to correct the class mailing list.

Is there any specific reason why you would like to continue with your yahoo e-mail account?

Alam

[J Guidosh]

Dr. Alam,

You raise good points, the only reason I stuck with the Yahoo account was because more people knew it and It's where I have most of my web site e-mail forwarded to. For the purposes of the rest of the class I might as well switch to using my gmail account just to ensure that there are no more problems of this nature.

Regards,
Jacob

[J Guidosh]

Jacob

I have same problem and slowly migrating myself from cc.ysu.edu ( an account I used more than a decade) and from [e-mail]

I does cause some problems. Especially not checking every e-mail address and missing some useful e-mails in the process. In my opinion e-mail has outlived its usefulness. The future is short disposable SMS or things like twitter and these social software to keep in touch with people.

Alam

[J Guidosh]

Dr. Alam,

I do agree that e-mail in social networking is becoming obsolete, but I don't think the tool will be useless. Really, the entire idea is no different than the messaging option given by Facebook and the other social services. Would it perhaps be more accurate to say that the stand alone e-mail service is seeing its last days? The term e-mail may fall into disuse , but really I consider any form of asynchronous communication over the internet (with the exception of certain things like message boards) to fall into that general category. This might all be a fault of my perception of the definition of e-mail, and its all conjecture, but either way things should be very interesting as these tools continue to develop.

-Jake

[J Guidosh]

Jacob

e-mail as it was proposed in original internet rfc was to communicate short messages between a small tightly knit group of researchers.

The current reincarnation is gmail where there is threading between different e-mails that are flowing between two people. Still it does not solve the explosion that occurs when a group of people start working on a project. That is what is explained in blog post I put in on the my NING blog. It shows all the arrows and connections in a communication situation and how use of wiki reduces it. You need to really go through it. That was the purpose to put it there.

The IM and its variation that you see in Facebook is also an improvement. you see how they thread the IMs together on facebook.

At this point people are drowning under five different e-mails addresses and probably receiving 100-200 e-mails a day and they have simply started ignoring e-mails even if they are coming from their business associates. So in an organizational setting e-mail is dying its natural death because it was a useful tool for short communication between a small group of people. It was never designed to do what it is being designed to do.

Just like here. I am writing you this e-mail and answering you. I am pretty sure that other people in the class need to know this information but it will be locked here between you and me. I have a choice to forward this e-mail to entire class but I already sent four important e-mails and if I forward this one that will be no. 5 . They are having trouble finding those four what do you think will happen with this one?

I hope you get the point. With that I will request you to take all these e-mail between you and me on this topic and post it in the group we created on "managing the information from multiple sources" in a threaded form so that people get an idea on what went on here.

Thansk

Alam

[Javed Alam]

Jacob

I have more information now on why I think that e-mail may be being pushed beyond its possible capabilities. Here is a video from Google talk that discusses this issue at great length.


Here is a full web site that goes about how to use e-mail effectively

http://www.43folders.com/izero