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Microblogging Will Marginalize Corporate Email

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Re: Microblogging Will Marginalize Corporate Email

#2
Look at the Yammer feature list; microblogging isn't marginalizing email, it is pretending to be email.

  Behind the firewall installation: Yes.
  Public notes: Mailing list.
  @replies: Reply.
  DMs: Standard email.
  Groups: Mailing list.
  Private groups: Mailing list.
  File attachments: Duh.
  Favorites (a form of bookmarking): Flag.
  Tagging: Filters.
  Conversation threading: Standard.
  Unlimited character length: Email started this fad!
  Search: Duh.
This begs the question, What the hell is the point?! Email already does email pretty well and is much more familiar to people (especially the old crusty decision makers) so why choose anything else?

Re: Microblogging Will Marginalize Corporate Email

#3
post #2

Look at the Yammer feature list; microblogging isn't marginalizing email, it is pretending to be email. Behind the firewall installation: Yes. Public notes: Mailing list. @replies: Reply. DMs: Standard email. Groups: Mailing list. Private groups: Mailing list. File attachments: Duh. Favorites (a form of bookmarking): Flag. Tagging: Filters. Conversation threading: Standard. Unlimited character length: Email started t…

It's centralized? That's all I can think of. To be honest, I can't imagine somebody wanting to use Yammer.

    Unlimited character length: Email started this fad!
Ah, the joy of aggressive feature promotion.

Re: Microblogging Will Marginalize Corporate Email

#4
post #2

Look at the Yammer feature list; microblogging isn't marginalizing email, it is pretending to be email. Behind the firewall installation: Yes. Public notes: Mailing list. @replies: Reply. DMs: Standard email. Groups: Mailing list. Private groups: Mailing list. File attachments: Duh. Favorites (a form of bookmarking): Flag. Tagging: Filters. Conversation threading: Standard. Unlimited character length: Email started t…

I think many of these articles come down to one thing: microblogging services need to monetize, fast.

Re: Microblogging Will Marginalize Corporate Email

#5
post #2

Look at the Yammer feature list; microblogging isn't marginalizing email, it is pretending to be email. Behind the firewall installation: Yes. Public notes: Mailing list. @replies: Reply. DMs: Standard email. Groups: Mailing list. Private groups: Mailing list. File attachments: Duh. Favorites (a form of bookmarking): Flag. Tagging: Filters. Conversation threading: Standard. Unlimited character length: Email started t…

> This begs the question, What the hell is the point?!

It raises the question. Begging the question means something else. Look it up.

Re: Microblogging Will Marginalize Corporate Email

#6
post #2

Look at the Yammer feature list; microblogging isn't marginalizing email, it is pretending to be email. Behind the firewall installation: Yes. Public notes: Mailing list. @replies: Reply. DMs: Standard email. Groups: Mailing list. Private groups: Mailing list. File attachments: Duh. Favorites (a form of bookmarking): Flag. Tagging: Filters. Conversation threading: Standard. Unlimited character length: Email started t…

What's new about twitter is that you don't specify the recipients. That is a real difference, and the right thing for some kinds of messages currently sent by email.

Re: Microblogging Will Marginalize Corporate Email

#7
post #6
post #2

Look at the Yammer feature list; microblogging isn't marginalizing email, it is pretending to be email. Behind the firewall installation: Yes. Public notes: Mailing list. @replies: Reply. DMs: Standard email. Groups: Mailing list. Private groups: Mailing list. File attachments: Duh. Favorites (a form of bookmarking): Flag. Tagging: Filters. Conversation threading: Standard. Unlimited character length: Email started t…

What's new about twitter is that you don't specify the recipients. That is a real difference, and the right thing for some kinds of messages currently sent by email.

That's true for Twitter, but not of Yammer, which is essentially a glorified mailing list. (Is there anything else that the Yammer model offers over email? If so, I'm not seeing it at cursory glance.)

Re: Microblogging Will Marginalize Corporate Email

#8
post #7
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's new about twitter is that you don't specify the recipients. That is a real difference, and the right thing for some kinds of messages currently sent by email.

That's true for Twitter, but not of Yammer, which is essentially a glorified mailing list. (Is there anything else that the Yammer model offers over email? If so, I'm not seeing it at cursory glance.)

It could well offer fewer features, presented from a useful alternative perspective and without the old method's social baggage.

Having said that, my first instinct upon reading this feature list is to suspect that you're right. Yammer has too many of email's features. They need to leave more things out. Otherwise the pathological behaviors that characterize corporate email (poor composition, unclear expectations, inbox overload, endless chains of quotations, complex workflows, reliance on cut-and-paste versus publish-and-link, the use of Microsoft Office attachments) will just port right over, and nothing will change.

I'm guessing that removing the character limit will prove to be an especially foolish design decision: Who wants to read five-paragraph Tweets? And file attachments are probably even worse. One of the charms of Twitter is that it refuses to allow such dinosaurs. Instead it forces you to adopt an amazing modern technology -- the hyperlink -- to point people at your blog, or your Flickr set, or your Slideshare page, or your Scribd page, or your github account.

Re: Microblogging Will Marginalize Corporate Email

#9
post #2

Look at the Yammer feature list; microblogging isn't marginalizing email, it is pretending to be email. Behind the firewall installation: Yes. Public notes: Mailing list. @replies: Reply. DMs: Standard email. Groups: Mailing list. Private groups: Mailing list. File attachments: Duh. Favorites (a form of bookmarking): Flag. Tagging: Filters. Conversation threading: Standard. Unlimited character length: Email started t…

I see this question a lot...why microblogging? Why not just stick with email?

As twitter has shown, there's value in the posting of notes about what you're observing, reading, thinking. I like to think of it as messaging without guilt. Email, IM have a certain social expectation, microblogging doesn't. I like the way Alan Lepofsky put it: "Email is 'reply hoped for'. Instant messaging is 'reply expected'. Social messaging/microblogging is 'reply optional' (http://bit.ly/dm03).

The principle here is that people are so much more than the jokes they email, and the requests they send to one another. There's a whole lot of smarts people have that do not have a channel. And organizations are the poorer for not providing a way for employees to contribute these things they know and dream up.

Once this notion of commenting without guilt takes hold, a lot of what employees express becomes conversational material. And where will that happen? Likely within the microblogging app, not email.

Re: Microblogging Will Marginalize Corporate Email

#10
post #2

Look at the Yammer feature list; microblogging isn't marginalizing email, it is pretending to be email. Behind the firewall installation: Yes. Public notes: Mailing list. @replies: Reply. DMs: Standard email. Groups: Mailing list. Private groups: Mailing list. File attachments: Duh. Favorites (a form of bookmarking): Flag. Tagging: Filters. Conversation threading: Standard. Unlimited character length: Email started t…

And why not NNTP? Newsgroups offer all the listed features and NNTP is a mature protocol.

The only barrier is user infamiliarity with newsreaders. But newsgroups are close enough to e-mail that there should be plenty of carryover.

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