The Future of Messaging; it’s Email 2.0
Whatsapp, Chatheads and a gazillion other messaging tools have been popping up for years all claiming to displace email as the dominant communication tool of the 21st century but that won’t happen, why because email is yet to be revolutionized by the techpreneurs of our age, forget all this social media nonsense, the battle for supremacy will be over the inbox.
It’s funny to hear all the talk that email is dead, teens don’t use it, those who do are overloaded but the fact is that our online lives resolve around the inbox, we still need that magical email address to register on most sites and even when Facebook Connect is an option they inevitably ask for your email address because it’s the hub and that won’t change for another decade.
Currently we’re still at Email 1.0 and it’s been very effective thus far, but given the overuse and abuse of it things are changing and it sure is time, Esther Dyson has for a long time championed the idea the the recipient’s time be valued and a price set as an incentive and that’s what we’ll see, a time we’d eagerly pull out our credit card to pay for attention, a response from the people who’s attention we want quite like consulting a doctor, a lawyer or any other professional but in this case the benefits will be widespread enabling anyone offering advise to be compensated for their time, something that hasn’t happened online yet, and that’s the problem.
The alternative to paying would be time exchanged for time, for instance the sender would be required to mark an email as urgent before it finally get’s delivered to the recipient(s) inbox but not at the time of composing the message but after it has been sent an email is sent to the sender requiring their attention, this would establish the value of the recipient’s time so if in fact the email is urgent the sender will take the time (a few seconds) to click a link and validate it’s urgency and if it’s not then it’ll be ignored leaving the recipient uninterrupted until they choose to see the other folder where non-urgent emails will reside so the inbox will only be used for urgent emails or replies to messages intended just for the recipient.
These solutions could drastically reduce the flow of emails or at the least make them compensatory.
Continued development in messaging will continue, with people embracing the latest “technology” but let’s be honest, most exchanges are between two people and email already does that pretty well.
First published on my blog, remailproject.com on April 26th 2013.
Rehan’s Mail Project - The Future of Messaging; it's Email 2.0
