Microblogging Will Marginalize Corporate Email(bhc3.wordpress.com)
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Microblogging Will Marginalize Corporate Email
http://bhc3.wordpress.com/2009/03/13/microblogging-will-marginalize-corporate-email/
16 comments
What's new about twitter is that you don't specify the recipients. That is a real difference, and the right thing for some kinds of messages currently sent by email.
I don't specify the recipients when I send an email to a mailing list. It goes to whoever is subscribed to the list, similar to how twitter messages go to the users who are following the person sending (or how it would go to a "group" in Yammer).
Then you might say, "But there is also a public feed of all the tweets" to which I would reply, "There are plenty of public interfaces to mailing lists". Gmane is essentially twitter if everyone used tags and tweets were actually given context in the larger conversations they create. And there was a lot less worthless noise.
There is nothing new here. Basically, Twitter just took away the ability to specify a group of recipients when sending an email, limited the character count, removed file attachments, etc.; Yammer put those features back. I hope Yammer becomes super popular because eventually someone else will then notice, hey, we're essentially using email again!
Then you might say, "But there is also a public feed of all the tweets" to which I would reply, "There are plenty of public interfaces to mailing lists". Gmane is essentially twitter if everyone used tags and tweets were actually given context in the larger conversations they create. And there was a lot less worthless noise.
There is nothing new here. Basically, Twitter just took away the ability to specify a group of recipients when sending an email, limited the character count, removed file attachments, etc.; Yammer put those features back. I hope Yammer becomes super popular because eventually someone else will then notice, hey, we're essentially using email again!
That's true for Twitter, but not of Yammer, which is essentially a glorified mailing list. (Is there anything else that the Yammer model offers over email? If so, I'm not seeing it at cursory glance.)
Our company has over 200 employees on yammer out of about 2000 employees worldwide, so I'd say our adoption is somewhat large enough for me to comment on its dynamics.
Yes, I'd agree that it matches features with a mailing list but the types of messages that are posted on Yammer would be unacceptable to send as a company-wide email. People mostly post updates about where they are, conferences they are attending, and if they're working from home or remotely. Marketing-types tend to post links to the latest techcrunch or gigaom article. Designers tend to post the latest links off of delicious/popular. As far as the character limit, its treated just as twitter and no one posts anything too large.
With a corporate-wide mailing list, everyone would have to read every single message. People tend to correlate the number of recipients with its importance. Yammer messages can be easily ignored and read at leisure. As a poster, this naturally diminishes any inhibition when firing off a message. Perhaps it's just the obvious outcome of a messaging infrastructure wholly separate from our corporate email, which has expectations and political baggage. Maybe this says something about the state of email tools...
Yes, I'd agree that it matches features with a mailing list but the types of messages that are posted on Yammer would be unacceptable to send as a company-wide email. People mostly post updates about where they are, conferences they are attending, and if they're working from home or remotely. Marketing-types tend to post links to the latest techcrunch or gigaom article. Designers tend to post the latest links off of delicious/popular. As far as the character limit, its treated just as twitter and no one posts anything too large.
With a corporate-wide mailing list, everyone would have to read every single message. People tend to correlate the number of recipients with its importance. Yammer messages can be easily ignored and read at leisure. As a poster, this naturally diminishes any inhibition when firing off a message. Perhaps it's just the obvious outcome of a messaging infrastructure wholly separate from our corporate email, which has expectations and political baggage. Maybe this says something about the state of email tools...
It could well offer fewer features, presented from a useful alternative perspective and without the old method's social baggage.
Having said that, my first instinct upon reading this feature list is to suspect that you're right. Yammer has too many of email's features. They need to leave more things out. Otherwise the pathological behaviors that characterize corporate email (poor composition, unclear expectations, inbox overload, endless chains of quotations, complex workflows, reliance on cut-and-paste versus publish-and-link, the use of Microsoft Office attachments) will just port right over, and nothing will change.
I'm guessing that removing the character limit will prove to be an especially foolish design decision: Who wants to read five-paragraph Tweets? And file attachments are probably even worse. One of the charms of Twitter is that it refuses to allow such dinosaurs. Instead it forces you to adopt an amazing modern technology -- the hyperlink -- to point people at your blog, or your Flickr set, or your Slideshare page, or your Scribd page, or your github account.
Having said that, my first instinct upon reading this feature list is to suspect that you're right. Yammer has too many of email's features. They need to leave more things out. Otherwise the pathological behaviors that characterize corporate email (poor composition, unclear expectations, inbox overload, endless chains of quotations, complex workflows, reliance on cut-and-paste versus publish-and-link, the use of Microsoft Office attachments) will just port right over, and nothing will change.
I'm guessing that removing the character limit will prove to be an especially foolish design decision: Who wants to read five-paragraph Tweets? And file attachments are probably even worse. One of the charms of Twitter is that it refuses to allow such dinosaurs. Instead it forces you to adopt an amazing modern technology -- the hyperlink -- to point people at your blog, or your Flickr set, or your Slideshare page, or your Scribd page, or your github account.
I see this question a lot...why microblogging? Why not just stick with email?
As twitter has shown, there's value in the posting of notes about what you're observing, reading, thinking. I like to think of it as messaging without guilt. Email, IM have a certain social expectation, microblogging doesn't. I like the way Alan Lepofsky put it: "Email is 'reply hoped for'. Instant messaging is 'reply expected'. Social messaging/microblogging is 'reply optional' (http://bit.ly/dm03).
The principle here is that people are so much more than the jokes they email, and the requests they send to one another. There's a whole lot of smarts people have that do not have a channel. And organizations are the poorer for not providing a way for employees to contribute these things they know and dream up.
Once this notion of commenting without guilt takes hold, a lot of what employees express becomes conversational material. And where will that happen? Likely within the microblogging app, not email.
As twitter has shown, there's value in the posting of notes about what you're observing, reading, thinking. I like to think of it as messaging without guilt. Email, IM have a certain social expectation, microblogging doesn't. I like the way Alan Lepofsky put it: "Email is 'reply hoped for'. Instant messaging is 'reply expected'. Social messaging/microblogging is 'reply optional' (http://bit.ly/dm03).
The principle here is that people are so much more than the jokes they email, and the requests they send to one another. There's a whole lot of smarts people have that do not have a channel. And organizations are the poorer for not providing a way for employees to contribute these things they know and dream up.
Once this notion of commenting without guilt takes hold, a lot of what employees express becomes conversational material. And where will that happen? Likely within the microblogging app, not email.
I think you paint an overly-rosy picture of the usefulness of microblogging. There may be value in the posting of these minor notes -- people in general seem to be narcissistic enough to confirm that -- but I have yet to find much value in reading them.
I used Twitter for about 8 months and during that time I don't think I read a single valuable tweet that didn't contain information that I shortly found through some other channel. Most tweets were pure noise. What was worse is that I joined in with the noise and I am not the sort of person to broadcast what I know to be irrelevant information. Suddenly because everyone was wasting my time, it was okay for me to waste theirs.
Yes, microblogging may be increasing commenting, but those comments are largely noise; most people can only cite specific instances, usually revolving around real-time events, where Twitter was of any real use to anybody. There is a cognitive cost to reading all those tweets, not to mention a time cost, and I found that those costs far outweighed any perceived benefit in almost all cases. With a mere 140 characters to convey information, it seems like this would be the case of the majority of the time.
Microblogging takes the friction and guilt out of speaking (essentially), which I think is bad. You should think before you write or speak. You should ask yourself, "Is this information of significant use to a majority of those who will be subjected to it?"
I used Twitter for about 8 months and during that time I don't think I read a single valuable tweet that didn't contain information that I shortly found through some other channel. Most tweets were pure noise. What was worse is that I joined in with the noise and I am not the sort of person to broadcast what I know to be irrelevant information. Suddenly because everyone was wasting my time, it was okay for me to waste theirs.
Yes, microblogging may be increasing commenting, but those comments are largely noise; most people can only cite specific instances, usually revolving around real-time events, where Twitter was of any real use to anybody. There is a cognitive cost to reading all those tweets, not to mention a time cost, and I found that those costs far outweighed any perceived benefit in almost all cases. With a mere 140 characters to convey information, it seems like this would be the case of the majority of the time.
Microblogging takes the friction and guilt out of speaking (essentially), which I think is bad. You should think before you write or speak. You should ask yourself, "Is this information of significant use to a majority of those who will be subjected to it?"
It's centralized? That's all I can think of. To be honest, I can't imagine somebody wanting to use Yammer.
Unlimited character length: Email started this fad!
Email already does email pretty well and is much more familiar to people (especially the old crusty decision makers)
Not sure where you've worked, but corporate email is horribly broken. Those crusty old decision makers are getting hundreds and hundreds of emails a day and would like a reprieve.
Not sure where you've worked, but corporate email is horribly broken. Those crusty old decision makers are getting hundreds and hundreds of emails a day and would like a reprieve.
I think many of these articles come down to one thing: microblogging services need to monetize, fast.
And why not NNTP? Newsgroups offer all the listed features and NNTP is a mature protocol.
The only barrier is user infamiliarity with newsreaders. But newsgroups are close enough to e-mail that there should be plenty of carryover.
The only barrier is user infamiliarity with newsreaders. But newsgroups are close enough to e-mail that there should be plenty of carryover.
There already is carryover, many email clients are also newsreaders and speak NNTP.
> This begs the question, What the hell is the point?!
It raises the question. Begging the question means something else. Look it up.
It raises the question. Begging the question means something else. Look it up.
This begs the question, What the hell is the point?! Email already does email pretty well and is much more familiar to people (especially the old crusty decision makers) so why choose anything else?