New Forms of Electronic Communication

I don't know if it's just me or if other people are feeling this too; email is starting to feel really antiquated. It's kind of like in the late 1990s when someone you knew still had a rotary phone in their home, in some spare bedroom or other seldom-frequented place and you used it - this same thing that you used countless times just 10 years earlier - and it feels so very old.

Email today is often used as a sort of slow-motion chat without any public persistence. People will send brief notes back and forth to each other and then after the problem is solved, the solution reached, the email is either deleted or filed away and only the two people involved in that conversation know the answer. Sometimes that's good but in collaborative environments this is often valuable information for other people, too. Copying these other people into email conversations just to keep them informed results in too much noise and overflowing inboxes. Chat tools, on the other hand, are too temporal and are also very disruptive.

I think the answer to this lies in the type of communication seen on Twitter and now being adopted by Facebook and other social media sites. This is the use of the broadcasted "status", or "tweet". For anyone who's not aware of what this means, a user types a short blurb about what they are doing, a question they may have, an idea they want feedback on, etc and it is broadcasted to their followers. The result is a "timeline" for each user of their tweets that can be subscribed to by people who are interested in what this person has to say. All of this information is stored in a publicly-accessible location (on the web) and it can be searched. Specific tweets can be directed at certain people (using the @USER convention) and subjects can be applied using hash tags (#TOPIC).

I think a system like this could be adopted very effectively for collaborative or corporate use with the addition of "context". So a user would identify the audience for their tweet, like "my team", "project X team", "department", "enterprise", etc. Users could apply filters to feeds to see what is immediately relevant to them, search for historical information, or read departmental notices when they have time. Of course, this would not replace email entirely; email is still important for formalized communication between two people or for sending information outside of an enterprise although much of that could eventually be done away with and replaced with a good content management system with publishing and workflow features.

It will be interesting to see where the future takes electronic communication. I know that Google is working something called "Wave". More information can be found here: http://wave.google.com/ It seems to work in a similar way as what I am describing although it's hard to know for sure since it's not released yet. Twitter and Facebook have all but replaced email for interpersonal communication for many people. Let's see if the corporate world follows.