Accept no substitutes

#noemail – Kids these days vs Banning email

Two completely different takes on email and #noemail came out last week. They are bookends to the ongoing discussion about how to communicate effectively. One looking backwards and arguing for an imagined utopia; one looking forward (or at least in the present) and arguing for better interactions and better productivity.

Starting in the present, Thomas Knoll of Primeloop talks about developing a communications culture at his business rather than an email culture in his post on Medium, “I banned email at my company.”

Haters gotta hate - email edition

Knoll acknowledges that email is hard to avoid for external interactions (but not impossible I quickly add), but that email culture can be replaced by learning to: Ask Questions, Share Information (using Hackpad), Passing Around Files (using Dropbox, Slack and Trello), Asking for Feedback (Hackpad), ToDo Lists (again Trello), Notifications (Slack), and Reporting to Others (WorkingOn).

All and all, a useful medium length post of a self-conducted best practices in communications amongst knowledge workers and coders with real results. Recommended.

That time when you were about 16 – 26 is that only time that music has been really really good. Probably several other things fit in that same category and time. For Alexis Madrigal, writing for The Atlantic, email is one of those things. Just like some one in his 40s explaining the music of his youth to death, Madrigal overexplains email and converts no one in his article “Email is still the best thing on the Internet.” If it’s so great why is email being abandoned and reengineered? Kids! Listen up! According to Madrigal: “Email was a newsfeed, was one’s passport and identity, was the primary means of direct social communication, was a digital package-delivery service, was the primary mode of networked work communication.” I mean WAS. But is no more. Kids-these-days with their Instagram, their WhatsAp, their Snapchat, their WhateverElseIsCool, they just don’t get it. They should rediscover email — and buy vinyl while they are at it.

Most of Madrigal’s article nostalgizes email, but even at that he does get something right. Whatever replaces email in whatever forms — including I agree Instagram, SnapChat etc — would be better for the customers and better for their companies in the long run if there were open standards for such services. Yes, I plan to make that case in October at the 13th annual WWW/Internet Conference in Porto, Portugal.

1 Comment

  1. Thomas Knoll

    Thank you for writing up your thoughts on this Paul!

    FWIW, similar to the way a lot of “chat” services are being built on top of xmpp, I could be a strong proponent of building more of these communication tools on top of smtp. And, along those lines, my strongest social network is still my “address book” and would love deeper connection between the people on these other productivity services and my own social network address book.

    Kind of ramble-y right now because I can’t give this the full attention it deserves right now. But, if you’re up for continuing the conversation, count me in!!

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