Tag Archive for 'email'

The prognosis for email…

Published by Ben Kepes on July 9, 2008 in Business, Collaboration, Design, Efficiency and IT. 1 Comment

Over on RWW, Alex Iskold posted about email, asking whether or not it is in danger. Alex pointed out that there are some threats to email, in the form of Twitter, Instant messaging and SMS. Alex came up with a diagram to illustrate the areas that email has traditionally been used, and where it’s strengths lie;

p3

Alex uses the fact that email is poor at broadcast, discussion and business to come to the conclusion that, while email isn’t going to disappear anytime soon, new tools are a threat to how much we do via email. He suggests a splitting of the ways - with consumers moving to new forms of communication and enterprise remaining wedded to email. It’s most informative to read the comments under the post - the consensus seems to be that email is here for the long haul.

Conceptually I’m all with Alex on this one, but in practice the reality is closer to what Zoli points out in his post. Twitter, IM and SMS are mainly used in a social context. The fact is that most employees will use these tools where appropriate, but will revert to email where an audit trail or a historical sequence is required.

More to the point we’re seeing tools such as Xobni that aim to make it easier to utilise the power of the network, directly via email. This, is to a certain extent reinforcing emails position as the medium of choice.

Sure Wiki’s and IM are great for some things (Wikis for a collaborative project, IM for short sharp “mindbursts”) but email is still the primary tool and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Zoli posted this diagram which try’s to depict the continuum for communication - I would title it the early adopters communication continuum but regardless of that it’s an interesting concept.

Communication Continuum

Either way email is here for the long haul - sure different products (be they add-ons like Xobni or disrupters like Gmail) will come and go but it’ll take something significant to damage the momentum that email has, especially within business use.

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OnlineGroups out of Beta

Published by Ben Kepes on June 17, 2008 in Business, Collaboration, IT, New Zealand, New business, SaaS and Strategy. 1 Comment

I received notification today that OnlineGroups is out of beta and has been released. GroupServer powers email lists with a web forum interface, that supports file-sharing and chat. They aim to achieve the equivalence between the email and web interfaces that Yahoo! Groups and Google Groups have. The difference is that allows the creation of email groups on a site that you can manage.

OnlineGroup has released the same software that powers their own SaaS offering - they’re banking that they’ll levarge the open source community development of the product, as well as pick up some implementation consultancy work from the uptake of the offering.

As they say (and I posted about a year or so ago);

SaaS with OSS works for Automattic with WordPress, and for SugarCRM, so why not us?

Good luck guys - it’ll be interesting to watch developments.

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LinkedIn replacing email? No time soon…

Published by Ben Kepes on June 13, 2008 in Design, Efficiency, IT, SaaS, Strategy and Web x.0. 1 Comment

Over on RWW, Bernard posted suggesting that LinkedIn is both a Gmail and an Outlook killer. His rationale seems to come from the fact that LinkedIn mail is always up to date (as member update their own records it doesn’t rely on first a contact remembering to notify a change of detail and secondly the information being updated in Outlook Gmail. Bernard also values the qualitatively differentiated contact, anyone on your contact list is by definition high quality so some of the heavy listing in terms of networking has already occurred.

So far so good, but there’s plenty of reasons why this will never fly;

  • Walled gardens - sure LinkedIn might open up their network but using their platform as an outlook/Gmail replacement is (almost) as proprietary as it comes
  • LinkedIn is business specific - I’m not sure about Bernard but my Gmail contacts run to around 2.5k individuals. Some business (and bear in mind I’m involved in several different businesses), some personal friends, some family friends - I want to be able to email anyone from my email app - it therefore needs to only to be neutral and open, but it also needs to be use agnostic - LinkedIn is by definition geared towards business use
  • Out of network email - Bernard suggests that, as email standards are open, LinkedIn could handle email outside of the LinkedIn network. In doing so LinkedIn would have negated any benefits of their in house email offering and would have recreated Gmail - why would LinkedIn dilute its special sauce just to compete with a product Google gives away?
  • Part of the compelling reason to use Outlook/Gmail is the scheduling functionality - it doesn’t make much sense for LinkedIn to recreate this but not having that offering is a deal breaker to most users

Sorry Bernard but I reckon you’re right off the mark on this one.

Now, Bernard does make some other good points. Fact is that Gmail as a free offering is just a little scary from the reliability, continuity and security point of view. There needs to be another solution that is paid for, web based and enterprise grade. Oh yeah - there is.

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