People have been ringing the death knell for email on and off for a few years now. But should we be listening?
The latest peal came from French IT company Atos, which declared that it would phase out internal emails by 2013. And for reasons we’ll all recognise: too much time spent dealing with too many emails, of which too few are useful and too many are spam. CEO Thierry Breton said his staff would instead use good old face-to-face communication, as well as instant messaging (IM) and social media tools.
The shadow of social media
Rumours also circulated when Facebook launched its Social Inbox, which brings users’ emails, chat and texts together in one place. Both co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg questioned the future of email – at least in its current format.
‘Email – I can’t imagine life without it – is probably going away,’ Sandberg announced at Nielsen’s Consumer 360 conference. ‘If you want to know what people like us will do tomorrow, you look at what teenagers are doing today.’ Good to know that in time we’ll not only be swapping email for SMS and social media, but also pledging eternal love to Justin Bieber.
Last year did see a drop off in email users, by far the most dramatic of which (59 per cent, according to US internet research firm ComScore) was among 12–17 year olds. However, the average 13-year-old has different communication needs to the average office worker. (The fall in use by 25–35-year-olds was 18 per cent, and in 35–44-year-olds only 8 per cent.)
IM steps up
The main pretender to email’s throne is instant messenger. A quick Twitter poll revealed its appeal – it’s informal, chatty, good for knowing who’s at their desk and for getting a quick response. One woman contributed the excellent point that, as she is deaf, it is a handy equivalent to the telephone.
However, IM is not without its drawbacks. It is distracting, not so good for detail and sometimes used when an email would be more appropriate. One tweeter summed it up with: ‘Occasionally useful, often annoying. Especially when you’re watching someone composing what should have been an email.’
Many people said they used IM alongside email: evidently it has its place, but it’s not an email replacement.
Five reasons to love email
With three billion users, email is clearly doing several things right. Here are five unique benefits:
1. Your account will be compatible with your recipient’s, no matter what programme you each use.
2. You decide when you reply, so you have more control over your time management – a choice you don’t get with instant messages and phone calls.
3. It encourages thought-out and structured messages by providing formatting tools and (almost) limitless space.
4. Unlike most instant messaging services (or phone calls), it still works if the recipient isn’t there at the moment of sending.
5. It allows you to keep a record or reference by saving and filing useful information to your own system.
This isn’t to say that email can’t yet be improved upon. There are already tools available to help sort through, and even explore and utilise the data within your inbox. Granted, some of these do merge information from social sites, and to an extent the line between the two is blurring. By the time those 12–17-year-olds are taking meetings, email may have become a very different animal. But it’s definitely not dead yet: and it’s still evolving.
And for advice on managing your inbox, check out our Top tips for smart email.