Is email really efail - or, would you really run your business on Twitter?

I know its tres fashionable to trash email as a failure compared to more modern (aka incomplete) systems like Twitter etc (Coding Horror being the latest to cast aspersions) - but is it really true? For example, he pointed to thoughts by one Tantek Celik on the subject (abridged below)

1. Point to point communications do not scale.

All forms of communication where you have to expend time and energy on communicating with a specific person (anything that has a notion of "To" in the interface that you have to fill in) are doomed to fail at some limit. If you are really good you might be able to respond to dozens (some claim hundreds) of individual emails a day but at some point you will simply be spending all your time writing email rather than actually "working" on any thing in particular

However, while 1:1 email is not scaling for me, I feel like 1:1 IM is scaling which would seem to refute the above reasoning. There are two reasons why this is not so:

1. You are only busy with instant messages (IMs) from people when you are active in your IM client. People can only send you IMs when you choose to be online, rather than whenever they choose to do so. This gives you much tighter control over both how much and when you IM, as opposed to email which continuously piles up whether you are online or not.
2. Perhaps IM simply has a higher scaling limit than email. That is, per the three hypotheses, since IM is much more usable than email, perhaps there is a factor of 10 or more in terms of the number of IMs you can receive and respond to as compared to email. In other words, perhaps IM also has a 1:1 scaling limit, but just one that I haven't encountered yet.

Now this is just not a valid comparison. He's comparing a system which has total persistence to one which you limit the participants, only communicate when you are using it, and that has no persistence. Of course its going to be less overloaded, because you're governing it in all sort of ways. I think nearly everyone who pans email and praises (insert your favourite comms system du jour) makes the same cognitive errors:

(i) Your email address is usually more universal, ie more people contact you on it - thus, by definition, the volume of email will be higher

(ii) Email is typically used by people you have to talk to, IM by people you prefer to talk to. Imagine if everyone used Twitter the main comms medium, and email was a private system between friends. Boot, foot, other......

(iii) Email has persistence (it builds up) and is Asynchronous (it waits for you). IM's are the falling trees of comms - if you are not there to hear them, they don't exist.

If IM had persistence and was used by all people to talk to you, it would mount up as quickly as emails do. Or, if emails faded away within seconds of not being read and only a few people had your address, it too would be a wonderfully lightweight system.

Where I think he is more on the button is here:

2. Emails tend to be bloated with too many details and different topics.

Email requires more of an interface cognitive load tax than IM (as compared to the time spent on writing the content itself), thus people naturally put much more into an email (perhaps in an unconscious effort to amortize that interface tax overhead across more content). People may feel that since they are already "bothering" to write an email, that they might as well take the time to go into all kinds of detail, and perhaps even add a few more things that they're thinking about it.

In other words, people write too much stuff in an email. In this respect systems like Twitter are better, they force you to say your piece in 140 characters (its why I don't like Friendfeed - that's Twitter for people who like to woffle).

Actually though, I'd argue the problem with email is that the cognitive load tax is too darn low - for the sender - i.e. there is just not enough of a transaction cost to make people think twice about writing and sending their essays off to multiple cc's. This low transaction cost is true as well for all IM, but that is mitigated by typically no CC capability, non persistence and not being asynchronous. In fact, that is Email's problem - it is just so powerful in comparison, that the "just click to call" simplicity becomes a problem

No, the real trick to make Email usable (and in fact to make any mass comms system that replaces it usable) is, counterintuitively, to put more of a cognitive load on the sender upfront. Now, looking at Coding Horror's 3 thoughts in that light:

We should avoid sending email out of a deep respect for our peers -- so that they are free to communicate as effectively and as often as possible with us.

1. Channel that private email effort into a public outlet. Discussion boards, blog entries, comments, wikis, you name it. If it can be indexed by a web search engine, you're in the right place -- and many more people can potentially find, answer, and benefit from that information.

Interesting idea....but how might it work in practice? Do you still need to send a mail/twitter/whatever saying where they can find it? (And in some cases, the last thing you want is for comms to go public - its more than your cover that gets blown ). Nonetheless, a good idea.

2. If you must send email, make it as short as possible. Think of it as Strunk and White on speed. Can you reduce your email into a single paragraph? How about two sentences? How about just the title field with no body, even?

Now this I think is a Twitterific idea - imagine if emails only allowed say 500 characters before the writer had to go through some hassleful procedure to get more (ah, they'd send it all as attachments, making it doubly irritating)

3. Remember the theory of communication escalation. Email is just one communication tool in our toolkit; that doesn't mean it is always the right one for whatever situation is at hand. Take advantage of phone calls, instant messaging, text messages, and so forth, as appropriate. Scale your choice of communication method to the type of conversation you're having, and don't be afraid to escalate it (or demote it!) as the ebb and flow of the conversation shifts.

Don't you just love those people who email you, ring you to see if you got it, and ping you on Skype "just to make sure".

So none of this (with the exception of the 1st) will really solve the problem, which is that email is a more powerful comms system than the others and too easy to send. It comes back again to increasing the sender barrier, so they self-regulate.

Taking a leaf from IM's book, imagine if:

- You could only send emails to 4 people at a time (like Skype)

- Emails were only 500 characters (like those text boxes on some websites) and no attachments allowed, just url links (Twitter)

- You chose who had your email address (all IM), and anyone else's emails to you were dumped into a "don't see um" tank (Twitter)

- Any email sent to you when you weren't online bounced back to the sender "undelivered - try again later" (IM)

Email would be wonderful, as you can see - of course, some other system would have to take up the mass comms load, and people would bitch about that filling up their inboxes, but hey......

(Which is my point, really - if we didn't have email, we'd just have to invent it again)