Alas poor Outlook, I knew him well
In August 1992 I was working my company’s booth at Macworld Expo in Boston. Across the aisle from my company was CE Software. CE was promoting, with great response I might add, their new killer app.
I have to hand it to CE, they really had their act together for that show. Their booth, while not the largest or flashiest was really packing in the interested attendees. I was actually thankful because we both had a crappy booth location. But the interest they were generating was attracting more people than their booth could accommodate so we got the spillover. We were able to engage the periphery and talk about what we were there to promote. But people what these people really wanted to see was this amazing CE product that allowed companies to manage something called email.
Now before people get all huffy and accuse me of revisionist history please fire up the WayBack machine in your head. In 1992 the function that would become known as email for those not connected to some kind of mainframe typically involved CompuServe, Prodigy, GEnie, AppleLink, the nascent AOL or something similar. It would be a few more years before SMTP and POP3 would become familiar terms to most people and begin to resemble what we would all recognize as email today.
In 490 BC an Athenian herald named Phidippides ran 26 miles from the battlefield near Marathon to Athens to deliver a one word message; nenikékamen or “we have won” in ancient Greek. That fateful day brought mankind two crucial developments. The first was the marathon which forever enabled Kenya to best countries with indoor plumbing in an athletic contest. The other was email, which forever enabled countries without indoor plumbing to sell pills for erectile dysfunction without a prescription.
The need to send messages quickly across great distances was possibly first recognized on that day. The technology improved over the years. Before long squires were tying message-bearing parchment to the legs of falcons or on to the shafts of arrows. In 1984 FedEx had a great idea. It occurred to them that perhaps people had some documents that could not wait for an overnight delivery. They devised a system known as Zapmail that involved a magical machine that could be fed documents. These documents could be received by another similar machine in another city within minutes and delivered to the receiving customer on the same day. Of course FedEx abandoned Zapmail as a complete failure just two years and two hundred-thirty million dollars later with the advent of the fax machine.
FedEx lost hundreds of millions of dollars on man’s need to communicate quickly. Phidippides, however, gave his life because on that day in 490 BC he died just after delivering that last message. But email, the modern Phidippides has crossed mile marker 23 in its marathon and will soon be just as dead. It won’t be the distance that kills email, it will be Twitter.
Twitter is about minimalist communication. But brevity, as they say, is the soul of wit. Twitter is easier to use and far easier to search than email. But I have noticed a trend in my personal daily computer use. I have both Outlook and several Twitter applications running in the background all day long. Twitter, however, gets my attention first. I’m not exactly sure why but I think it along the lines of knowing that whatever I’m being tweeted will be short and quickly addressable. I find that I wait longer to slog through my email. Hmm.
Name one thing you do with email that you could not do with Twitter. Okay, okay, Twitter limits you to 140 characters, I get that. But I’m willing to bet that you have repented your long-winded ways and learned to communicate effectively within that constraint. Think about your email inbox, how is it looking since you started tweeting? My email is usually no farther away than the smartphone clipped to my belt but my email has still been piling up. Email allows you to send attachments and Twitter does not. Nope, you can do that with Twitter as well. There are so many methods (Box.net, Google Docs, etc) you can use to put attachments into the cloud where they belong in the first place. Twitter does, however, still have its version of spam.
Spam by any other form is still canned mystery meat. Since the day bad marketing met the Internet mankind has been getting spammed. But for some reason Twitter spam bothers me less than the email variety. Maybe this is because someone wanting to show me how I can get ten thousand new followers in a week (yeah, whatever) is less damaging to my fragile male ego than someone insinuating that I might need cheap Canadian Viagra. But Spam on Twitter is easier to manage.
In China or Romania at this very moment there is a developer trying to figure out how to defeat the filters on my Exchange server. Sooner or later he will find a way to get through. But on Twitter all I have to do is unfollow the spammer and the problem magically goes away.
Twitter recently changed their following limits. You cannot add more than one thousand people in a day and your limited to following two thousand people until your followers get above that number. Twitter says they put the limits in place to limit spam but this perhaps this is a whitewash. Have you noticed that the “Fail Whale” surfaces less now that Twitter imposed the following to followers ratio limits? Fighting Twitter spam is quite simple and it reminds me of the old First Amendment argument for unpopular speech; “if you don’t like it, change the channel.” After all, it is my choice to follow someone back. If I don’t like what they have to say I can just as easily un-follow.
For many reasons Twitter spanks email. Over the coming months we will find more ways to use this simple yet powerful tool to change the way we all communicate. Part of Twitter’s path to finding revenue streams lies there but I’m not going to give too much away. But Biz, Jack or Evan follow me and send me a DM. We can talk about the future. I promise I will follow you back, unless you spam me.
And as for you China, I don’t need your little blue pills but thanks just the same.
