Very interesting article in the New York Times that talks about Google and Yahoo changing their email systems into social networks. Yahoo's version will be called Inbox 2.0 and will include features that will determine the strength of your relationship with someone by how many times you exchange emails and instant messages. They are obviously trying to respond to the popularity of MySpace and Facebook but do you think it will work?
Check out the article and let me know what you think...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I also read this article earlier and added it to my Delicious feed. However, I do not believe this will work. I do not see email as social media. It is a private function. Yes, email can be construed as "social" by one-to-many communciations, or many-to-many communications; but these forms of correspondence would be far better suited with technology such as wikis, list-servs, or even common "social network" conceptions like Facebook. I think email is on its way out, and even making it more "social" cannot save it. Communication is evolving into an even faster medium: IMs, SMS, instantaneous video and audio chat. I just fail to see the reasoning for trying to make email social. It goes against the entire fundamental idea of "email". Just my two cents.
Actually Josh, I completely agree with you. I think that trying to change email into a social network will be a failure. Maybe if they would have thought of this idea when social networks were just starting to gain popularity they could have pulled it off because people were not completely familiar and comfortable with the technology back then. Yet, now, with the explosion of social networks, email will become outdated as more and more people use social networks to correspond with each other. I mean it's just a lot easier to add email capabilities to social networks than to try and create a new social network out of emailing. I just don't see it happening.
I agree with Josh. email was the killer app, but not for the coming generation. For them, email is a place clogged by spam. IM is the standard for them, more restricted in a good way, more exclusive in a good way. But oddly these younger users have yet to discover Twitter.
Will they?
Post a Comment