On The Convergence of Email and Chat (Google and Apple [and Yahoo] Get It)

I think its safer to say that email has been used for something it does not suit, social communication. I dont think there will be a sea change as you suggest, just a shift of usage to a better suited featureset.

Lets take people’s need to communicate as a given irrelevant of medium, and look to traditional usage to see where the future may go.

I wouldnt send an IM to a colleague to setup a meeting, I wouldnt expect my lawyer to phone me regarding an important transaction, I wouldnt like if my bank phoned my house with my statement. In the same way sending letters to friends at a bar seems ridiculous, but thats effectively what we’ve been doing up until now.

Email is good at formating and recording communication. It is not good at quick conversations that dont need to be reviewed at a later date. It is also not very good at one to many conversations where you do not have everyone’s attention as a single point in time.

Both IM and email fulfill different needs. IM has been, and still is to some extent, relatively inaccessible to the masses. Its increasing pervasiveness and standardization has resulted in its growth but it is wrong to say email is dead even if overstating for effect.

Hi Josh,

I think these comments are too contextualized. I think this is about life stages and context of use. To say we are moving away from Email and towards chat/IM to me doesn’t make sense. I see where “presence” notification within e-mail is useful and the ability to toggle between email and IM/Chat is useful as well, but that does not mean that email is going away or even lessoning.

Sometimes, asynchronousity is just required and I believe that the older one gets the more it is required.

Here is an example. My friend and I used to IM all the time and talk on the phone and get together for lunch. We barely ever emailed and we never thought of SMS text messaging even though we always had the ability.

Boom! Parenthood. All the synchronous options disappear from our lives and now text messaging is the way to go. Now you could say that IM is just as asynchronous as text messaging, except you are not always at the same terminal, but you do always have the same telephone. You can respond when you are ready and my friend and I both being parents understand that a response may not be instant (thus not instant messaging).

But further, we also e-mail more b/c we realize that even Text messaging is pushing the person to respond in a way that may be inappropriate given their social situation.

But let’s talk about work. When ya leave the MySpace generation you end up going to where? Oh! right! I have to work for a living. Synchronous communication abounds and grows, but it is also VERY disruptive.

Every management class I have gone to in the last 3 years has started out saying that electronic communications are disruptive to productivity more than they are helpful. Now that extreme statement I take with a lot of grains of salt, but there is definitely something to it that shouldn’t be ignored.

And because many people separate their work communications from their personal communications (I.e. 1 done in office and one done at home), it makes even less sense to connect them through a synchronous communication device.

Now, will social morays change over time? Possibly. But I see the context of use as being too powerful for these changes to move at light speed.

I’m not sure I completely agree with the social/work - sync/async divide.

I’ve seen adoption of IM increase significantly in distributed work environments. Probably in parallel with the outsourcing phenomonen.

Email was abused when people needed a quick ping ‘will you be on the call’,'we need your opinion on this customer issue’,'can you join the meeting now?’ etc. These instantanious and disposable pings were/are clogging our inboxes.

People are still learning when each tool is appropriate. Thats part of the reason for the growth of IM and ‘decline’ of mail. More of an adjustment than a phasing out of email.

It may be worth it to recall that Apple integrated iChat and Mail.app a few years ago. If I received an email from you, I could respond via IM.

Here’s what would be required: and you and I were logged into IM (specifically iChat), and I had your IM screen name in an address book card, along with the email address you emailed from. When I got your email, a small icon would appear in a column of my mail client, allowing me to reply to your email via iChat. There’s also a button available on the read window to allow email reply via iChat as well.

It looks like Yahoo gets it too: http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/11/09/single-ajax-interface-for-yahoo-mail-im-coming/

HI “Pauric”
I have been designing enterprise collaboration systems for a few years now. IM is definitely what people keep asking for, but for very limited contexts, not as a replacement for email. On the other hand, in my onsite visits with many enterprises, it feels that IM is more of a feature request then a real design need. Even those companies that request it don’t know how they are going to use it.

There is definitely a generational aspect to this as well, but even within a single generation I notice that there is a divide between those that find IM and similar synchronous communication to be too much of a disruption b/c it is too easy and too impersonal compared to a phone (synchronous) or email (asynch).

Hello “Dave” (o; (pauric is my real name, not a handle!)
very insightful post. “it feels that IM is more of a feature request then a real design need.” This request may be driven by the recognition that email isnt a one stop shop solution for business communications. The mass adoption of the Blackberry alludes, to me, towards the need for a more synchronous paradigm, however it doesn’t solve the problem, overload.

An aspect I haven’t seen mentioned here in the IM v Email discussion is filtering. From the perspective of enabling communication, the low level pings that are IM are filtered out of your inbox when you have IM functionality between both parties. I feel there are currently too many barriers holding back IM from user’s communication mindset, e.g. different apps, different standards.

A fault with email; you can send anyone an email without their permission. Is a flaw with IM; both parties must go through the effort of inviting and categorizing each other. Its hard to conceive of a solution to these contradictions at either end.

Off the top of my head I would divide my business communication in to three general types.
IM: immediate, instantaneous, disposable
Email: detailed, discussion, debate, recorded
Group: broadcast, announcements, meetings

The recognized issue is that all three are coming in on one channel. Notes has tried, and will continue to fail it seems, to wrap this up in one solution. I’m not sure why the recipe is so hard to find, your thoughts?

Why is the recipe so hard?
1. Legacy and interoperability. Email still has to work with email outside of Notes or outside of the enterprise.
2. The modes your outline well above are ephemeral and not necessarily conscious decisions. E.g. I often do IM like activities with email, where I’ll send a single sentence in an email waiting for an immediate reply like, “Are you coming to the meeting?” They person has IM on their system, but I used e-mail for no apparently good reason. It was just a choice.
3. Yahoo and Gmail interestingly are seeing this problem and offering interop between email and IM (at least in one direction).
4. mobility and ubiquity. Can I make SMS and IM work together? If so how? Who sets up the connections? How to do it well across different carriers? Forget the handset, what about different terminals (PCs)?
5. Deciding what to capture and how to encode its capturing? In the enterprise everything has to be captured, but not necessarily encoded, so there are different levels of recall of captured material.

on and on this goes. combining the 3 facets of communication you mentioned to me goes on and on and doesn’t even deal with other areas of collaborative information management:
reputation management
folksonomy and other metadata standards
public vs. private
controlled environments vs. unstructured (wiki vs. email vs. CMS vs. blog vs. sharepoint, etc.)

and again, on and on. Where does it all end and begin?

Again, thanks for your insight. I’m coming at this from a user’s perspective who happens to be a UI hack, forgive my ignorance.

I’m left with 3 thoughts after reading your, again, very informative comments
1) In your points 1 to 5 you describe what seem to me to be more or less techincal problems
2) You are right to ask where does it all begin and end. To be human is to communicate (and to err) but to win the war we must choose our battles, so I see a fairly distinctive line around generic corp comms: IM, email and group email. Featuresets such as collaboration vary from team to team, company to company.
3) After reading your post I now see that we are talking about features of communications and what is needed is to wrap those disparate options in to a UI…

I, as a user, would now like the following;

1) When I want to talk to someone I first think of the person. So the address book should be the front end, it will show me if their IM is on, if they’re traveling, timezone, PTO etc. From there I can make a decision as to how to contact them; SIP, SMS, IM, Email etc You highlight a very important issue “I often do IM like activities with email” and that is because we find ourselves within the email construct when our A.D.D. brain sidetracks, it is easier to im within email than to launch, search and generate and IM. I think a little ‘barrier to entry’ might actually aid the overall system here.

2) At the other end I do not want my attention diluted across different application windows. I want the system to understand my state of presense and direct incoming communication accordingly. I fully appreciate this is way out, but it is where we should be going.

These are lofty and ill defined requirements but I am wary of delving right in to implementation constraints without first giving a cursory glance at how I want to operate as a human, in what is a fundamental function of my being. I have two primary senses for comms; sight and hearing, the top presentation layer of the UI should have filtered/combined/funneled the system features to make the HCI as simple and transparent as possible.

This translates in to a unified address book, the direction google and yahoo are taking. And a new intelligent layer on top of the apps at the receiving end, an incoming personal assistant if you will.

It is very easy to look at the current implementation of Notes and see that they are pushing the system features out to the user and then trying to apply UCD after the fact. I’m told the next major revision is falling in to the same trap.

finally, thank you for your time and insight, a nice learning experience - regards.

Also, a key consideration is the corpweb - those millions of users who mainly converse and access the internet from their work. It is a fact that email offers better protection from the wild than does IM. Also, many large companies, mine included, do not allow standard installation of any IM. Email as a corporate messenger has many more advantages over IM. It will not die. I also agree with Pauric’s comments.

Eerst Europa Doelstellingen: De Ci2i Verzekering (Ci2i) zal het nummer een gebrandmerkte pan Europese commoditized online verzekeringsmakelaar door 2010 zijn.

@ Alice Mike, please don’t spam the comments with that.

Ontopic: I agree with Dave: Legacy and interoperability. Email still has to work with email outside of Notes or outside of the enterprise.