Technology Should help us to give our Messages more Intelligence and Value, not slow it down

This is in response to the following post:

Who receives these daily messages?

And we are both responding, in part, to Ev Williams’ post here:

The Daily Message

Jon Morgan has posted a response. Here are bullet points:

• Editors were once gatekeepers, but who can afford a personal assistant or editor? This is something which could be automated, however.
• Skimmit and Ozy’s Daily Presidential Brief are examples of services which intelligently summarize the news, and this model could be applied towards our personal email
• Editors of the future will need to be intelligence gatherers and curators of information
• Email threads are frustrating
• Comments in Google Docs can be frustrating
• Jon describes his experiment involving Slack and Freshdesk: send email to Freshdesk where it can be managed as tickets, and watch for pertinent messages as they display in Slack’s feed
• Letters were limited by length, expense, and were delivered slowly, so the messages itself needed to be written carefully and clearly. It was these limitations and the effort involved which gave the letters value.
• Takeaway Quote: “I wonder if it would be more essential to ask how technology could give our messaging more meaning, value, and order.”

Keep reading for the full response

You’ve articulated with words something that I’ve also been thinking about a lot lately. And, this ties in nicely with what I’ve been thinking about Ev Williams’ suggestion about a messaging app.

Velocity and Volume

First, I’m not sure if an app like this would be delaying the delivery of messages, or the reading of messages. I’ve been turning airplane mode on in my phone at night before bed, and in the morning when I switch it off it will ding and I will get all of the messages I would have seen immediately (had I not been sleeping). There is a great feeling of gratification to see what’s arrived and catch up on news I’ve missed. But, this is all information which would have all arrived regardless of what I did.

If the tool is cloud-based, then there can really only be a change in how soon they are shown to us, because delivery is instantaneous. This could be managed through filters and customization, such as “Show me only messages with these keywords, or messages marked ‘urgent.’” Of course, most email clients allow you to do this now, with labels, filters, and even automation.

If we want to capture the feeling of getting and opening a letter that’s been sent through snail mail, like the “old days,” then I’m sure that it would be possible to create an app which does this. But, unlike the “old days,” some of us are getting hundreds of emails per day, which in the olden days would have translated to hundreds of pieces of mail, so ultimately it doesn’t benefit us to delay reading a message or slow down delivery.

Intelligence

I think what we’re really craving is a messaging app that adds intelligence to the messages that we receive. I’ve often thought about how we need something in our daily lives which works similarly to intelligence-gathering agencies like the CIA or NSA (based loosely on what I’ve learned from watching TV shows like Homeland). You’ve mentioned the idea that Facebook is made up of “letters to the editor” which are written and posted where there are no editors. At one time, there were letters to the editors because newspaper editors were both the gatekeepers and filters for information. Today, individuals must seek out the right information and manage the messages they send out, but I think that the average person needs help.

Slower messaging assumes that people can be counted on to communicate concisely and clearly, but I don’t think they always do. Newspaper editors are able to review messages (news stories, or letters to the editor) and polish them so that the messaging is clearer. Intelligence officers listen to what’s being said and then pick out the most important information.

I personally think that the editors of the future will need to be like intelligence gatherers, sorting through the information that’s shared on the Internet, organizing it into a form that’s easier to digest, and then publishing their summaries. I’ve subscribed to two services which already do this: Ozy’s Daily President Brief, and Skimmit.

CIA in your pocket?

Nobody is going to hire personal assistants or editors to process their email, so it’s safe to say that there needs to be some way to automate the processing and summarizing of new messages. In my previous responses to Ev William’s proposal, I mentioned the idea of structuring emails (or whatever they are) so that they are written with more intelligence. I suggested that recipients of an email could respond to specific portions of the email, so that they’re responses are tied contextually to something that the sender had said. This would work a lot like Medium. The email message itself might be written like a headline or a summary. Love your idea, I only had a few changes. See comments.

Real World Examples of why Message Intelligence matters

My biggest pet peeve with emails lately has involved the long conversations that become interwoven between the lines of messages. For example:

What do you think about going out for lunch. I was thinking about checking out the new pizza place downtown. Or we could get Chinese.

Then someone responds within the paragraph.

What do you think about going out for lunch.

>That sounds good.

I was thinking about checking out the new pizza place downtown. Or we could get Chinese.

>I’m really in the mood for hamburgers.

This might go on until it takes a few minutes to sort out which line of text is the newest response. And, it’s even worse when you’re trying to find the thread and/or a specific email later, because while the discussion shifted to “hamburgers,” the subject line continued to read “Lunch?”

So, I have become like our organization’s intelligence officer, taking emails and trying to summarize or catalog them in a way that makes sense in the future. Or, even trying to identify decisions and deliverables, which can also be lost between exchanges.

My other pet peeve has to do with Google Docs. We will start a document with a list of development tasks or ideas, and then everyone uses the comments feature to respond to the items in the list. This is great, until suddenly there are nine different items being discussed inside nine comment threads, and nobody really takes the lead and says, “So, what have we decided?” or even summarizes the discussion in the main part of the document itself.

So, while contextual commenting is light years ahead of emails, it’s not perfect either. I’ve tried to compensate for this limitation by breaking down the document in a tool I use called Podio, and then associating any comments or conversations. That way, I can see in one screen what was asked for, any discussion, and then the conclusions or action items.

I know that there are a lot of excellent tools out there. Basecamp had a really good way of grouping any new messages which were shared while you were away and sending them in a simple, concise email. And, I always loved their timeline which showed you exactly what had been posted, by whom, and when. But, I think that we need something more.

Slack and Freshdesk Experiment

Over the last ten months, I’ve been experimenting with a new way to process my email. At work, we use Freshdesk to manage our requests from customers. As we were trying out Slack, I discovered that it was able to integrate with Freshdesk. I found that the two talked to each other real well, and that it was handy being able to see messages sent to Freshdesk in Slack’s feed.

I set up something similar with Pivotal Tracker, and now I can monitor all activity within both of these tools from Slack. If it’s good to know, then no additional action is needed from me. If I want to respond or follow up, then I go into the respective tool.

I’ve found the tickets in Freshdesk so easy to work with that I started an account for my personal emails and side projects. Now, all of my messages go into a single Freshdesk site, and they are displayed in a second Slack site that I started for personal use.

I find that tickets are better than emails because they tend to be managed as informational assets as opposed to just messages, like in services such as Google Mail. Once the ticket is opened, you can catalog it, modify it, update it with notes, and share it. The sender can also add to it via the web without creating a thread of messages back and forth. One could argue that you can do a lot of this with email, but I’d say that tools like Freshdesk are more similar to Google Docs than Gmail because the tickets are more like living documents.

I’ve ended up with a system that allows me to see new messages immediately (via Slack) but when I need to I can still go into Freshdesk and view messages under different filters. Messages/tickets I have responded to, or don’t require action, can be closed and archived for future reference or deleted. Freshdesk also offers the ability to export data as a spreadsheet, so I have that as an option if I ever need to store my messages elsewhere.

I believe that I’ve found a method that helps me make sense of incoming information. With fine tuning, maybe an automated system could be created which achieved some of the same thing as my Freshdesk-to-Slack combination. It most likely would be a lot better.

Conclusions

I agree that it was often nice to receive a letter in the “slow mail,” but maybe we are focussing too much on the speed of the letter’s delivery when we need to focus on something else entirely: the value of the message itself. The nature of letter writing was that it couldn’t be changed once it was down on paper (or in the envelope) and you couldn’t take back what you wrote once the letter had been delivered to its recipient. Plus, letters were limited to only a few pages (front and back) unless you didn’t mind paying a lot for postage.

So, it was important to write a letter as plainly and as concisely as possible. This inherently gave the act of writing a letter, and of reading it, more more value. And, you didn’t know how the recipient felt about your words until their letter back arried in the mail.

I wonder if it would be more essential to ask how technology could give our messaging more meaning, value, and order. Messages could be delivered more slowly if a slower speed adds value, but I’m not sure that it would. And, we can use filters and rules today which delay our reading of messages.

I have read that some news services are already using computers to generate news stories using algorithms. I wonder if the same thing could be applied to our messages? A thread back and forth between co-workers about where we should eat at lunch could be summarized by a computer as, “Jon would like to have pizza for lunch, but Bob prefers hamburgers. They are wondering what you would like?’

I’ve written a summary at the beginning of this article to help demonstrate what could appear at the top of all of our messages or message threads. Hopefully, highlighting key information brought value, or if you reached this point in my post you’ve found what I’ve written to be insightful.