Life is grand

In Inbox 2.0 the New York Times reports that Google and Yahoo! are looking to enhance their online email systems with social networking features. Instead of having to belong to Facebook and import all your contacts from your email application your email application becomes a Facebook.

The interesting angle on this is the rich data from your email history that surrounds your contacts. Those you email frequently, those that email you often, those you ignore, those you forward to other contacts, the spammers and so on. With data mining you could even see whose email you treat with more importance by looking at response times (if boss reply now, if mother reply in three weeks is my trend. My poor mother.)

A lot has been made out about the death of email due to spam and also the new generations switching to messaging features in social network sites, instant messaging, Twitter etc.

But I still use email a good deal. So do most business people and most of the older generations. I am also confident that the newer generations are not “avoiding email” but simply using the closest thing to hand. Email needs to get back into the center of their communications.

One problem I see with the Inbox 2.0 strategy is that I do communicate elsewhere and via other means. Comments on blogs, posts on forums, posts on my own blog, links in Delicious, photos on Flickr, instant messages, Twitter, YouTube videos and, in the converged future, SMS and voice.

Any kind of Inbox 2.0 is going to need to include a much wider range of methods than just email and IM. Thankfully most of the alternate methods have an email address at their center, often as your login ID.

I’d look forward to GMail, my preferred email client, offering richer social network features. But to be truly Inbox 2.0 it had better include my Flickr photo stream and my friends Twitterings.

(Thanks to John Collins for the link.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 at 4:26 pm and is filed under Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.