As most of the world is aware, Facebook launched its Social Inbox feature last week. The unified messaging system pipes online and mobile communication functions people use — SMS, instant messaging, Facebook chat messages — into a single inbox. On the face of it, having just one place to communicate with everyone from coworkers to family members seems like a good idea. But is Social Inbox the future of email or online communication? I don’t think so.
From Facebook’s point of view, the Social Inbox is undoubtedly a smart move. It opens up communication from Facebook’s user base to the wider public, as opposed to the social network’s previous systems, which were limited to user-to-user conversation. From a Facebook user’s point of view, a seamless system that abstracts the messaging experience away from the actual communication transport method is an attractive idea. No longer needing to worry about whether to contact someone via SMS, IM or email is appealing, and having a single message history should be useful, too. There’s also the added bonus of not having to look up someone’s phone number or email address before contacting them.
But unified inboxes are tricky to get right (and Facebook isn’t the first to try it; Mozilla has been experimenting with unified inboxes with its Raindrop project). The reason for this, as Ray Sun notes in this blog post, is that the various underlying messaging systems and how people use them are fundamentally different. For instance, you cannot simply take an email thread and send it as SMS messages, especially if there are many participants and the messages are lengthy. Recipients would find them very confusing. Different communication methods are used in different ways, too: IM is a synchronous communication method, for example, while email is asynchronous.
Finally, some people don’t even want all of their email accounts routed to one inbox. Context switching (having to shift from, say, an email app to your phone or an IM client, or even from inbox to inbox) is not always a bad thing, especially if you like to keep your communication tools compartmentalized. Keeping work contacts in one inbox and your friends’ information in another is a good example of this.
Email: Still Alive and Kicking
Despite the fact that there are now many other online communication tools (some of which having been touted as “email killers”), email continues to grow in popularity.
I shared the reasons why I think email continues to be so ubiquitous in a previous post here at Pro, Email: The Reports of My Death are Greatly Exaggerated:
- It’s universal. Just about everyone online has an email account. Email works internationally and across cultures.
- It’s simple. You don’t, for example, need to explain to most people how to send a file or message using email.
- It’s asynchronous. Unlike IM, where both parties need to be online for it to work, emails are stored until the receiver is able to deal with them.
- It has few constraints. Unlike some other communication tools, email enables you to send very rich messages: You can simultaneously email a bunch of people, include as much information as you like in the message, use HTML to add formatting and easily attach supporting documentation or files.
- It’s controllable. Individuals and businesses can run their own email servers. You don’t need to rely on a third party to provide your messaging service.
Faced with that kind of utility, it’s hard to imagine a function coming along and supplanting email, even if it’s a function being offered by a company as big as Facebook..
The Future of Email
The Social Inbox is an improvement from the older Facebook messaging systems, but it’s not the future of email. So what is?
I think it’s unlikely email will change significantly; to do so could break one of its primary advantages, which is universality. However, it’s possible that a new backwards-compatible set of standards could be developed that would add to email’s current functionality, much like the original text-only email standards were extended to include multimedia (MIME).
Rather than tinkering with the underlying messaging format, though, I think the real revolution that’s coming in email is extracting even more value from the system we already have. One way to do this is to use tools that utilize the data in users’ inbox and message history. Because so much of our communication happens via email, there’s a veritable treasure trove of data in our inboxes — who we communicate with, how often we email them, when we email them, how quickly they respond to us. All of this is waiting to be mined. Couple this with data available on the Web, such as social media feeds, and you can create tools that help people discover more about their contacts. Email could then automatically figure out who your most important contacts are, what time of day would be best to contact them and their recent activities.
Various startups are working on “Social CRM” tools that do this, such as Gist, Rapportive and MailBrowser. While the kind of functionality that their tools provide is currently only available as plugins or add-ons to existing email clients, and therefore currently only available to a small number of users, you can bet it won’t be long before this kind of functionality is baked into clients like Outlook and Gmail (in fact, Gmail’s Priority Inbox feature is already making this kind of functionality making it to the wider public). Having these kinds of easy-to-use but very powerful features available to everyone will make email much more useful.
Another way to get more from email is to integrate more tools into our inboxes. Email is so entrenched in most people’s workflows that trying to get them to use different tools (for project management, communication or file sharing, for example) is very difficult. But by integrating tools into that existing email-based workflow we’ll see much greater user adoption of those integrated tools and more efficient email clients. A good example of a tool that does this well is task management app Producteev, which has full email integration: Users can not only see what task are due through email reminders, they can also add new tasks simply by sending emails to a special address — they never need to switch out of their email client to use Producteev. Another example of an app with email integration is Basecamp; users can send in project status updates and messages via email.
The future of email is still email, it’ll just be a lot more useful. If Google is looking for a way to strike back at Facebook in the tit-for-tat squabble the two web giants are currently involved in, one way would be to hurry up the process of implementing social CRM features in Gmail.
