Recommended reading

[Chris Messina]

Two stories worth a look:

* Relevance Over Time from TechCrunch: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/12/relevance-over-time/

* Why email no longer rules... from WSJ: http://j.mp/wsj_streams

Also, if you haven't seen my talk from Finland, you might find it interesting:

http://tr.im/fj_mindtrek

http://tr.im/fj_mindtrek_v

Feedback welcome!

Chris 

--
Chris Messina
Open Web Advocate

Personal: http://factoryjoe.com
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/chrismessina

Citizen Agency: http://citizenagency.com
Diso Project: http://diso-project.org
OpenID Foundation: http://openid.net

This email is:   [ ] shareable    [X] ask first   [ ] private

[Yishay Mor]

2009/10/12 Chris Messina <chris....@gmail.com>

* Why email no longer rules... from WSJ: http://j.mp/wsj_streams

I love twitter, will tolerate facebook, and have had a spin on pretty much every messaging system with more than 5 users, wiki comments, IRC, plaxo, IM, whatever. I'm getting a bit bored by every financial reporter that wants to prove he's hip discovering twitter and  telling me email is dead.

Sorry, dude, email rules. Try to find the FB message you send your lawyer with your response to last years' contract. Try to escalate the support request you tweeted to the technician's manager. 

Email gives me messages up to 10MB, archiving, search, lists, security, as well as mundane features such as spell checking and formatted text. Give me a call when FB / twitter ticks half of those.

 

___________________________
 Yishay Mor, Researcher, London Knowledge Lab
  http://www.lkl.ac.uk/people/mor.html
  http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=yishaym%40gmail.com
  +44-20-72789524

[Chris Messina]

On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 1:30 PM, Yishay Mor <yis...@gmail.com> wrote:

2009/10/12 Chris Messina <chris....@gmail.com>

* Why email no longer rules... from WSJ: http://j.mp/wsj_streams

I love twitter, will tolerate facebook, and have had a spin on pretty much every messaging system with more than 5 users, wiki comments, IRC, plaxo, IM, whatever. I'm getting a bit bored by every financial reporter that wants to prove he's hip discovering twitter and  telling me email is dead.

Sorry, dude, email rules. Try to find the FB message you send your lawyer with your response to last years' contract. Try to escalate the support request you tweeted to the technician's manager. 

Email gives me messages up to 10MB, archiving, search, lists, security, as well as mundane features such as spell checking and formatted text. Give me a call when FB / twitter ticks half of those.

Hmm. I'm not sure that that's exactly what the article is saying.

I think the point is that email no longer "works" with people's attention spans and the amount of interaction they desire.

While the *features* that you're describing certainly aren't present in more of the stream-based systems, I think you're talking about the benefits of archiving and searching over a corpus of data, rather than the way in which it's delivered in real-time.

There's no reason why you can't add all those features to Twitter, Facebook or other social networks... but the question is: do you really want to replicate the foibles of email everywhere there's social functionality?

To quote Zawinski's Law:  “Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.”

I think this is becoming less accurate because the nature of the web is moving from asynchronrous document transmission to real-time messaging and conversation.

Perhaps the new law will be more like: “Every program attempts to expand until it tweet. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.”

(where tweet could also be replaced by "share")

[Robert]

Every program attempts to expand until it share...

ha

[Hans Granqvist]

I think the WSJ article failed to state what benefits activity streams
can give you. In the good old
days, email was the aggregation point and you would handle several
accounts in the same
mail client.

The explosion of ADHD channels (Twitter, FB, etc) doesn't create one
flood to dip your toe in; rather
it provides thousands of small creeks so far apart that you spend all
your day running between
them to see what floats through.

I had hoped to read more about how this aggregation scenario, how
common "streams clients"
can bridge the gap and create the flood for you. Perhaps this is what
Google Wave is all about.

[Yishay Mor]

good point. I now noticed this towards the end of the article: "Now, people can use the right tool for the right task."

this is a new communication literacy we're developing - how to multiplex channels, how to choose what to communicate on which channel, and when to switch from one channel to another. FriendFeed type aggregators can help, although they need to get better. but there's another issue, and so far I haven't seen a tool that addresses it. How do you carry the context of conversation from one channel to another?

There's a good reason for us to hold this discussion on email. It allows us to think between acts, and gives us a breadth of expression. But what if I want to tweet it? invite some FB / LinkedIn friends to join?

Another example. Thanks to open web protocols, plaxo slurps my tweeter feed and spews it into my FB status line. For people who only know me through FB that produces a very bizzare image of me as someone who litters their everyday blabber with @s and #s. It also means that FB conversations often spawn off a random tweet.

___________________________
 Yishay Mor, Researcher, London Knowledge Lab
  http://www.lkl.ac.uk/people/mor.html
  http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=yishaym%40gmail.com
  +44-20-72789524

2009/10/12 Hans Granqvist <ha...@granqvist.com>

[Stephen Paul Weber]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

Somebody claiming to be Yishay Mor wrote:
> 2009/10/12 Chris Messina <chris....@gmail.com>
>
> > * Why email no longer rules... from WSJ: http://j.mp/wsj_streams
> >
> >
> I love twitter, will tolerate facebook, and have had a spin on pretty much
> every messaging system with more than 5 users, wiki comments, IRC, plaxo,
> IM, whatever. I'm getting a bit bored by every financial reporter that wants
> to prove he's hip discovering twitter and telling me email is dead.

Email is certainly not dead: we just have a lot of other tools now :)
I'll take an email over 10 twitter DMs any day, but I'll take a single
@reply tweet over a one-line email :)

- --
Stephen Paul Weber, @singpolyma
See <http://singpolyma.net> for how I prefer to be contacted
edition right joseph
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[Yishay Mor]

2009/10/13 Stephen Paul Weber <singp...@singpolyma.net>

Email is certainly not dead: we just have a lot of other tools now :)
I'll take an email over 10 twitter DMs any day, but I'll take a single
@reply tweet over a one-line email :)

Which I did. Now my followers are saying "WTF?" and readers of this list don't know what I said. 

So, any ideas how we preserve context when jumping channels?

[Stephen Paul Weber]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

Somebody claiming to be Yishay Mor wrote:

> 2009/10/13 Stephen Paul Weber <singp...@singpolyma.net>
> > Email is certainly not dead: we just have a lot of other tools now :)
> > I'll take an email over 10 twitter DMs any day, but I'll take a single
> > @reply tweet over a one-line email :)
> >
> >
> Which I did. Now my followers are saying "WTF?" and readers of this list
> don't know what I said.
> So, any ideas how we preserve context when jumping channels?

Unless you're 1:1 or with a rather small group, jumping channels is probably
never going to be a good idea. You can call someone about a letter, but you
can't call a circular.

- --
Stephen Paul Weber, @singpolyma
See <http://singpolyma.net> for how I prefer to be contacted
edition right joseph
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[Steve Ivy]

I don't think jumping channels is a problem, but, as Stephen points
out, jumping *scopes* is. Jumping from 1:1 in email to 1:1 twitter is
(to the user) pretty easy to follow. Jumping from a 1:* mailing list
to 1:1 twitter and back creates a real gap in information flow. This
is not specific to activity streams - you see this all the time with
off-list email replies that get brought back on-list.

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 10:01 AM, Stephen Paul Weber
<singp...@singpolyma.net> wrote:
>> Which I did. Now my followers are saying "WTF?" and readers of this list
>> don't know what I said.
>> So, any ideas how we preserve context when jumping channels?
>
> Unless you're 1:1 or with a rather small group, jumping channels is probably
> never going to be a good idea.  You can call someone about a letter, but you
> can't call a circular.
>

--
Steve Ivy
http://redmonk.net // http://diso-project.org
This email is: [ ] bloggable [x] ask first [ ] private

[Jim Meyer]

On 10/14/09 11:14 AM, Steve Ivy wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 10:01 AM, Stephen Paul Weber
> <singp...@singpolyma.net> wrote:
>

>> Yishav wrote:
>>> Which I did. Now my followers are saying "WTF?" and readers of this list
>>> don't know what I said.
>>> So, any ideas how we preserve context when jumping channels?
>>
>> Unless you're 1:1 or with a rather small group, jumping channels is probably
>> never going to be a good idea. You can call someone about a letter, but you
>> can't call a circular.
>

> I don't think jumping channels is a problem, but, as Stephen points
> out, jumping *scopes* is. Jumping from 1:1 in email to 1:1 twitter is
> (to the user) pretty easy to follow. Jumping from a 1:* mailing list
> to 1:1 twitter and back creates a real gap in information flow. This
> is not specific to activity streams - you see this all the time with
> off-list email replies that get brought back on-list.

I think we're getting closer to it. Changes in channel or scope don't
necessarily degrade communication fidelity; lack of context, when
required, absolutely does. This is the basis of most crypto systems and
a lot of art in digital signal processing. As Yishay observed,
communications frequently have context. Fidelity suffers the further
from the original context you get.

You can preserve context intrinsically in the message; consider the
executive summary intended to provide lightweight context for the deep
details of a report.

You can also preserve context extrinsically in the audience; if enough
of you followed Yishay on Twitter, the conversation could flow
seamlessly from here to there and back again without losing coherence.

This ignores context-free (or stateless) messages; those can either be
understood without the need for context or their context is so universal
as to be practically irrelevant.

I don't know why, but this strongly reminds me of delimited (aka
portable) continuations[1]. These are being implemented as a plugin to
the Scala 2.8 compiler[2] and soon to be used by Swarm[3].

Probably because I'm too much a geek.

Cheers!

--j, longtime listener, first-time caller.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delimited_continuation
[2]
http://blog.richdougherty.com/2009/02/delimited-continuations-in-scala_24.html
[3] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3626