If you let a coder (or, *shudder*, a user) specify the importance of her alert,
give her a little pull-down menu that has choices ranging from "nice to know" to
"white-hot urgent," and nine times out of ten, she'll choose "NOW NOW NOW
URGENT ZOMGWEREALLGONNADIE!"
A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email
61–70 of 88 posts
Re: A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally agree. Email works perfectly fine for me. For private purposes as well as for my job. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I don't see anything that's broken or that would require fixing.
Email doesn't scale well is the problem. The people complaining are those people who get a lot of email. I fall in the cateory and constantly struggle with it. Ultimately I think the real solution is a personal assistant.
In saying 'email doesn't scale well' I think you're really saying 'I don't scale well' (as you hint in mentioning a personal assistant) - in reality the problem is that email scales so well as a flexible and quick communication medium that people simply can't keep up - if you used any other form of communicating with these people who want some of your time (telephone, face-to-face etc) it would be even more cumbersome. Is it even possible to give a slice of your time to hundreds of people a day and still lead a productive and happy life? Should we try, or should we cut down the number of people we give this privileged access to? Our time is finite after all, and reading or answering email from people we don't know is not necessarily a good use of it.
Another approach to the problem of huge volumes of mail is to classify your senders at the point of contact by giving them different email addresses. That lets you check one mail address frequently (for close and valuable contacts only), and one email address every few days (for casual contacts, website contact, mailing lists etc), and only give out the important email to those whom you trust to use it appropriately (i.e. never publish it). This helps considerably to cut down volume which you see every day.
Email's strength is that it is a distributed free-form medium which can contain any sort of content. Trying to enforce structuring content with simplistic templates like this is just wasting the sender's time instead of yours - why give them the email address in the first place if you don't have time to read and respond properly? Why not have a web form which imposes structure and emails you the result, or an FAQ on a website?
While I agree there are huge problems with email as it stands, I'd say they're more to do with identity and sufficiently sophisticated semantic processing of incoming mail for those who receive a lot of it, not with the structure of email itself (which is admirably simple and has served remarkably well), or lack of hints as to contents (NB any such hints in the control of senders will be abused mercilessly by spammers).
Re: A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email
#63Yep. http://img267.imageshack.us/img267/3313/imagekm.png Give more power to benevolent senders. I've had similar thoughts. I don't want to waste other people's time, but the current email protocol forces me to. There is no way to specify if your email is... 1. "Check this out sometime during the week, it's funny stuff, if you have time. You need a 24"+ screen and 10 mins, so don't even look at this email on your phon…
Your first one is way to specific to be signaled by some kind of flags, the recipient might as well just read the subject line of your email if its well written.
But basically every e-mail client implements some kind of Priority/Importance header, that solves your problem. Nobody uses it though, and the few times someone decides to set "high priority" it might be in their opinion but not in mine. A more complex system won't see more adoption.
Re: A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email
#64> ... none of these solutions try to stop stuff from arriving in the first place... While I don't agree with this particular "frighteningly ambitious" take on the issue I do agree with that the above quote represents an issue that needs solving. In my opinion, forcing the sender to conform their email to a format of your choosing simply isn't scalable. The reason email is so well used today is because it's so simple…
The kind of email talked about by the OP, will not be for everybody -- it will be for those who get a lot of email and who have a large amount of social capital.
And frankly if you want to contact them, this kind of velvet rope is precisely what they want.
Re: A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean something like facebook messages?
Probably something like this?: https://bubbleideas.com Better skeumorphism of mail? Sure, like refactor and split mail from postage parts completely? Chris, can we connect with you over email? (the irony, ha!) [Disclosure: I work for the project linked above.]
Does that project have a bug bubble?
Re: A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email
#66I think email is the ultimate form of bad skeumorphism. It was designed to mimic postal mail. Email addresses, no permissions, no true id checks, no punishment for abuse. Many of the now used features like spam folders, filters, encryption, receipts were just tacked on (poorly). And because it's a "worldwide standard" that no one controls it's impossible for someone with a vision to try and change email. I say abando…
Email became unwieldy when it became a universal communication mechanism. Sending email does not mimic a very important characteristic of post, sending email is free. All abuse would stop if people were required to place a paid-for 'stamp' on each email they sent. Failing that, email will only be replaced by something else that people want to use en-masse, facebook messaging probably.
The idea that you could come up with an alternative messaging solution is beyond silly. Why would people use it? Any migration would require both systems to run in parallel but unless the new system incorporated every feature of the current email infrastructure people would simply not bother. And if it incorporated every feature then the abuse would migrate over too.
Re: A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email
#67I think email is the ultimate form of bad skeumorphism. It was designed to mimic postal mail. Email addresses, no permissions, no true id checks, no punishment for abuse. Many of the now used features like spam folders, filters, encryption, receipts were just tacked on (poorly). And because it's a "worldwide standard" that no one controls it's impossible for someone with a vision to try and change email. I say abando…
[deleted]
Re: A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably something like this?: https://bubbleideas.com Better skeumorphism of mail? Sure, like refactor and split mail from postage parts completely? Chris, can we connect with you over email? (the irony, ha!) [Disclosure: I work for the project linked above.]
Does that project have a bug bubble?
Handled? I just connected with you up there.
Re: A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email
#69I believe one reason people like instant messaging is that with IM you are kind of constantly having a converstation. It is very much ok to skip the "handshake" and go directly to point. "Lunch 12:30?" "Yes".
Email clients could offer instant messaging style interface for this kind of messages. Instead of seeing list of subjects, then selecting a message etc you would directly see the actual question and just answer it.
Re: A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email
#70I tried it out by sending him an email. Interestingly enough, the average response time for a yes/no question is by far the longest (5 days vs 3 days for a long email). Shouldn't responding to simple yes/no be much faster than reading a long message?
Still in closed beta so the stats are based on all my test mails. As I keep a bunch of them in Yes/No to play with sorting this screws up the current stats. Should be more reliable when actively used…