The World of Email is Changing

The World of Email is Changing. There is a long-overdue shift happening in which Email is being replaced by more effective & immediate ways of sharing information. And whenever we begin talking about the evaporation of email, someone in the room always asks, "So which Social Network is going to win?" The answer is none of them. But before I get into that, let's take a look at what's actually happening.

Imagine, for a second, that it's 1997 on a Friday afternoon and I'm at work. Outlook or maybe Gmail is the only communication tool that exists. Pretend for a second, that there is no Facebook. There is no Twitter. There is no Yammer. There is no Chatter. It wouldn't be out of the ordinary for me to send out an email to all my friends:

 
Now, imagine that some of the people on my "PeopleIKnow" list will ReplyToAll and share with the group what they're up to.

 
Some of us don't have to imagine this - we just remember. We didn't do this quite as much on Tuesdays as we do today but we certainly did this every Friday. We emailed each other and some of us ReplyToAll'd with our Status. Somewhere along the line, Facebook started making this "RE: What are you up to?" email a little more efficient. And here we are - all 600 million of us. Facebook has essentially given us a really awesome email thread tool in which we don't get to choose the Subject of the humongously long email thread we are trapped within. It's always, "RE: What are you up to?" It's what we at TheWorldChanging call a Public Conversation Thread.

Now, the "RE: What are you up to?" question is a good one. And it's certainly a popular thread for drawing out ReplyToAll's. But there are also lots of other emails with lots of other subjects being shared every day. And the majority of those are still stuck in our Outlook/Gmail Threads.

I know what you're thinking.

 
It's not. Twitter is providing the exact same service for us. Twitter has just chosen a slightly different Subject for our humongous ReplyToAll thread. In the world of Twitter, our globally-unmodifiable Subject is slightly closer to: What would you like to share? Twitter has also tweaked the "PeopleIKnow" entry in the To: field of our message - by helping us to create an EveryoneThatsEverHeardOfMeAndCares distribution list.

 
So that's two (out of thousands of) email threads which have now been moved out of our Outlook/Gmail and onto the web. But we're just getting started. Here's what you can expect next.