Email is overrated

Jonathan Grudin is a researcher from MSR who spoke today at our annual TechFest. Microsoft did an analysis of employee blogging and he talked a little about the results, but I confess I didn’t really pay attention to that part of the talk. More interesting were  his comments about ontology and the different ways the Internet is inventing to make things more discoverable. The most obvious one is tagging, where we see sites like http://del.icio.us and http://www.flickr.com getting users to post keywords that publicly associate words with links or photos. Clay Shirky says that, thanks to systems like this, “ontology is overrated.” Jonathan suggests that blogs are another solution to the problem of making things discoverable. The blogosphere is a community of interested users who find and organize things spontaneously and replace much of the need for an ontology.

This got me thinking that, well, maybe email is overrated. Think about it: emails are point-to-point messages sent without context. I understand them only when I know the sender and when something about the topic is relevant to me. A message that has no context for me is called spam, precisely because it is not part of any other context of my life.

Some messages are very private of course, but most of my emails might be of interest to more than just the people I happened to put on the to: list. What if instead of email, you just subscribed to my messages, tagged of course to reflect the various different subjects that I address. If you could subscribe to my message flow—and the right privacy-related tools were available to make it easier to manage—wouldn’t that improve communication, and help people focus on the topics and people they really want to follow?