What has become of email? I remember the early days in 1995 when you would dial-up to CompuServe with some excitement and expectation in your heart. There was the possibility that a friend had taken the time to write to you and you would, in due course, write back. Today it is a far cry from those halcyon days. It has become a tiresome sifting exercise filled more with trepidation than excitement. The inbox is just a dumping ground for everything from spam to an Amazon dispatch to quasi-spam from the bank, unless you have the discipline to set up a series of rules. Even those rules can only tackle so much of the steady barrage. Part of the problem is that there is so little content of importance and yet it all requires a certain amount of attention, even though small, it takes its toll. If I were to take a person who had never used email before and described to them what I had to do on a daily basis to keep ahead of the incoming stream and then told them what I actually got out of it, they would think I was a loony.
A lot of us can only endure this regime because it has happened slowly, like a frog slowly cooking at the water heats up. Twelve years later I still find that the most important email is that sent by people I actually know. The trouble is that it is hard to approach correspondence with the same enthusiasm knowing that there will be other distractions. The final straw is that, no matter what you do, it is still possible to lose some of the few gems amongst the rough to spam filters. At this point it feels like it is utterly failing.
Instant messaging hasn’t succumbed to this because you agree the connection to the other person and if you don’t like them you can block them. Email has no such agreement. This is what has driven the ultimate aim for phuser – to replace email for the people you know and care. We also want to make it more useful by joining all content related to a particular context and adding tools. Ze Frank covers this transition in his own style. Email also has many other problems and Robert Dewey has some good ideas on how email could be improved. We will never get rid of email (unless you are Prof. Don Knuth), it has taken on too many uses, but what I want is to be able to lift out from email all of the real people in my life and put them in phuser so whenever I log in I have that buzz I had back in 1995.
Don is The Don…