Email Is Dumb Too

Ok, so to be fair, I’m not expecting too much out of “smart” phones and
again I find it interesting that its been inferred that way considering
I didn’t place the precocious denotation of “smart” on the label.

To be egalitarian about the whole thing, email is pretty dumb too. With
all the advances we have enjoyed over the years, email has remained
relatively unchanged. There are smart boxes and apps galore that vow to
structure your email for efficiency so you can hit the proverbial “zero
inbox” status we’re all after now. Great — just little work arounds here
and there to compensate for email’s innate stupidity.

Email clients have been upgraded ever so slightly to include a social
stream tab, integrate with Dropbox for large attachments, etc. but what
about direct interactivity? Missing.

Think about what you send email for:

* Meeting Invitations
* Sharing Articles
* Sending Presentations
* Sending Photos
* etc.

Most of these include embedding a link that takes the reader to a
website to fulfill the next stage. Why? Can the email itself not work
unto itself? How about the millions of users who use the browser itself
to get their email?

Why haven’t we gotten to the point where the call to action is embedded
directly in the email and allows the reader to pony up right then and
there? Its still so dumb.

I want to:

* RSVP to that meeting, right then
* Read the article and add comment if I’d like
* View the presentation or slide deck
* View a carousel, comment, and share the pics
* Right from the email itself

How about storing some of my password keys within the email client
itself? How easy would it be to:

* Pay Invoices
* Share/Comment using Twitter or Facebook
* Yay/Nay a quick share
* etc.

It’d also be keen for these emails to be nested together and viewed like
you would a website blog so they’re all together… lets say tags. We’ve
all been there, trying to locate that all important email that we “had
right here” until we actually needed it and then plow through a dozen
unrelated search phrases.

Social networking is at its heart a way to communicate with people you
know (network), get feedback, and get on with life. Just like any
conversation you’d have in the real world. I don’t have to sign up to
take part in the water cooler service, invite my friends to share their
NCAA bracket to sit in a conference, or bore my colleagues with my
Saturday night affair with Häagen-Dazs and back to back Law And Order
episodes amidst all my brilliant ideas.

I use my phone to connect with people and like it or not we all still
use email. The question isn’t how do we do away with these two methods,
its how do we enrich them so they’re contemporary technologies.

The argument I pose is that we stop depending on apps to fill the gap
and fortify these standard bearers with the features all the apps are
making modular.

1 Reply to “Email Is Dumb Too”

Originally published at rynfrz.com on March 10, 2014.