The death of Email

[andrewducker]

There's something about e-mail that demands a reply, demands a response. But when you’re getting thousands of these things, it becomes an impossibility to respond to everything. So we’ve got to shift the etiquette, and maybe make e-mail more like publishing: that is, you send something out and you might get one percent response. I think that the paradigm of e-mail as letters, as objects, is inappropriate. I'm waiting for a shift to the timeline, rather than the object, as the organizing principle. If you think about a blog for instance, that’s a timeline. And it’s a really good way of organizing huge amounts of information, because we’re quite good at sequencing.

From here.

[Poll #149870]

Comments

[andrewducker]

It's an instant messenging tool. It may largely be used to mass chats, but you can do that in MSN too.

As far as I know, there's no massive different in functionality between MSN and IRC - both allow you to have synchronous communication either one on one or in a group.

[diffrentcolours]

Instant messaging clients are so called to differentiate themselves from IRC.

It's not so much a matter of functionality as common usage - most people use IRC for broadcasting and IM for narrowcasting. The two have very different cultures and user bases.

[andrewducker]

However, in this context I'm happy to treat them as being similar enough.

I didn't include 'bulletin boards' or "diaryland" either, despite them being different enough to be worth covering in some ways.