Why Social Trumps Email: Reply to Alan Lepofsky

By Michael Idinopulos | September 12, 2012, 9:19 pm | 11 Comments

I just had a fascinating Twitter exchange with my colleague and good friend Alan Lepofsky.

I had tweeted: “Reason #71 why I hate email: I start my day playing catch-up.”

Alan replied: “And does the same thing not happen in social software? At least in email its all in one place.”

And I thought to myself: No, Alan, It’s really no the same thing.

I can see where Alan is coming from. He has argued eloquently that shifting correspondence from email to activity streams doesn’t really accomplish anything. Of course on some level Alan’s right: Messages are messages, whether they come through email or an activity stream.

But there’s a huge, fundamental, monumental difference between email and activity streams: Posts to an activity stream are usually public inside the enterprise. (Or at least posted to a group.)

The transparent nature of the activity stream changes everything. When I reply to a post in an activity stream (a “Signal” in Socialtext-ese), I’m not only writing for the person to whose Signal I’m replying. I’m writing for everyone who has access to that conversation thread.

That’s a totally different mindset. When I go through my emails, it’s a series of updates–usually reactive–to individuals: Don’t do this, that is approved, can’t make this meeting, missed you at that conference. When i go through Signals, it’s an opportunity to model, to muse, to question, to inspire in a uniquely public and transparent way: This is how we should think about this, help me understand that, I’m making this a personal priority, let’s celebrate the awesome job she did on that.

So maybe it’s just my Meyers-Briggs type but no, I don’t feel like I’m playing catch-up on Signals. There’s work waiting for me there, to be sure, but it’s work that adds to my energy, rather than taking it away.

activity streams, email, Socialtext Signals

Comments (11)

11 Replies to “Why Social Trumps Email: Reply to Alan Lepofsky”
	“here’s a huge, fundamental, monumental difference between email and activity streams” Absolutely. I completely agree that activity streams are great for sharing things (ideas, answers, links) for everyone to see and that is beneficial to the overall organization (versus keeping information trapped inside inboxes) But I don’t see how that it related to your original post about feeling like you’re playing catch-up with email. If anything, it’s a lot harder to catchup with all the context shared in activity streams, blog posts, wikis edits, newly uploaded files, shared bookmarks, etc. Many people (not I) strive to achieve inbox zero. I’ve never heard anyone try to achieve social software zero as it’s impossible. Don’t get me wrong, obviously I love social software but I also think it brings with it just as many (or more) problems than email when it comes to information overload. By Alan Lepofsky \| September 12, 2012, 9:32 pm
	Reading my email is not the hard part. It’s replying, filing, and deleting that sucks the life out of me. I don’t have that problem with social. I actually like replying to Signals. By Michael Idinopulos \| September 13, 2012, 2:45 am
	Personally, it feels voluntary (and thus empowering) to reply in a Reply-Optional media (Activity Streams), and it feels reactive (and thus a chore) to reply in a Reply-Mandatory media (Email). By Audrey Tang \| September 13, 2012, 10:01 am
	We’re now interlacing two different topics. My response to Michael was regarding his tweet about having to play catchup with email, to which I stil believe you have more catching up to do in social software, as there is far more content there than in your inbox. This morning I “had to” check Facebook, Twitter, Google+, my internal Yammer network, the Chatter network for next week’s Dreamforce conference, etc. etc. That took me 30 minutes, my inbox took me 5. The emotional side of this is very different. I agree with a statement such as “I find engaging with my colleagues via social software more rewarding that doing so via email.” Of course I prefer posting in public where more people can participate and benefit from the conversation. By Alan Lepofsky \| September 13, 2012, 1:38 pm
	So IMHO, I tend to prattle on about this point when I talk about people using social software…that it is the difference between stock inventory and a flow. Inventory is email..its addressed item by item and only the inventory guy is doing it and if they don’t no one will. Social is a flow…more than that…it is a flow attended to by a network, a network that I helped construct. If I miss something that one of UK people posts, one of my US people will retweet it and I’ll see it when it surfaces there. Think about it like a Redditt …in email EVERY piece of email demands my attention..social software allows for my network to rank order the things I need to pay attention to…of course I first look at my Mentions then my Replies, then I have my twitters stream (for example) broken out into lists…I have a “Don’t Miss” column…that one I always check…I don’t always check my “Funny” column…email doesn’t really offer a way to so elegantly differentiate importance by source…I think I would quickly lose my mind if I thought of my Twitter stream as an Inbox. Yikes. By mark oehlert \| September 13, 2012, 6:27 pm
	“mail doesn’t really offer a way to so elegantly differentiate importance by source” – I’d argue that email offers far more advanced flagging, filtering, sorting and foldering tools than streams currently do. This issue is, very few people (myself included) use them. With email you can flag things for follow up, move items into folders based on name, sender, size,subject. Colour code messages. etc. I’d love a TweetDeck UI for my email. By Alan Lepofsky \| September 14, 2012, 12:06 am
	I see this really as “room based” or “person-to-person” difference. You get the best and worst of both of these on email. Because post-email tools are becoming social, it really means switching to tools that are more open and as audrey says, Reply-Optional. Activity Streams, are getting really good at this over the past few years, but IRC rooms have had the same culture (collaborative reply-optional discussion) and integrations (irc bots) in a lower tech way for many years. But my real question is when Michael I is going to go in-boxless… By Luke Closs \| September 14, 2012, 3:43 am
	i take your point Alan and I think what it comes down to for me is that I still see email as something that I have to deal with alone and my social media flows are dealt with by a network of people that I’ve built. By mark oehlert \| September 14, 2012, 3:53 pm
	Ok. First things first, I’m firmly on the social media brigade and it is my preferred mode of communication AND broadcast for the most part. To the extent that my social footprint is annoying to many. I completely buy and sell the collaborative nature of social software and the ability to swarm around problems as against putting it up on a closed channel. As we said with open source software, “When there are more eyeballs looking, all bugs are shallow.” All this said, I think the “email sucks” stance does the enterprise social story more disservice than good. Let’s face it – email isn’t going away anytime soon. And people who prefer it won’t change because of a training program you run. Let’s acknowledge that our view of email is a bit myopic and unfair. As someone who’s participated in and run communities from the turn of the century, I can say quite safely that the first forms of collaboration I saw on the web came with software developers. On open-source projects. On huge mailing lists. To this day, email is a superior form of communication for software developers. Not too many open-source communities actually run on social software. And there’s a reason for this. The same collaboration pattern that Mark talked about works for developers on say, the rather large Open MRS mailing list. Or on your local Linux User Group. If someone in the US doesn’t respond, someone in Australia does. With the ability to choose your own client or service and with services like Gmail giving you a really brilliant interface to manage your email, it works wonders for several people. And you really need to talk to this section of developers and see how social software actually comes in the way of collaboration for several of them. In theory, a lot of things that we speak of w.r.t activity streams and social software are also possible with say – an all company mailing list. Yes, it’s not very elegant – but a lot of people prefer that. By taking an ‘email is outdated’ or ‘email sucks ‘ we just polarise the ones on the email side of the fence way too much on the defensive and make change harder in the enterprise. Email is email – social is social. Each of them has their value. I’m not sharing a link to a performance review on my social business platform – sorry. In the same vein, I’m not going to crowdsource ideas on email. In my view though, social software will always struggle to make the change easy for enterprises unless it plays well with email to help make the change easy for all users. This has been the single biggest reason for our insane success with social software! Unfortunately all paradigms from the consumer web don’t directly translate to the enterprise. Pinterest would be over the moon if 15% of all internet users used their platform. Most enterprises would be gutted if only 15% (the social media savvy) people were active on their primary communication platform. Their lies the rub. Sumeet By Sumeet Moghe \| September 14, 2012, 4:24 pm
	Wow, this is quite the firestorm Let me clarify what I am saying and what I’m not. I’m not saying that “email sucks.” Email does suck, but that’s beside the point. Taxes also suck, and so do colonoscopies. But I don’t believe in a world without email, just as I don’t believe in a world without taxes or colonoscopies. Email may be a pain in the, er, colonoscopic region, but it exists for a reason. I agree with Sumeet that it’s not going away any time soon. The point of my post was more modest. It was really just a personal observation. I find microblogging gratifying and energizing in a way that emailing isn’t. When I post a Signal, I have more energy as a result. When I send email, I have less. Whereas email feels like a chore, microblogging feels like a contribution. By Michael Idinopulos \| September 14, 2012, 7:02 pm
	Michael – couldn’t agree with you more (and I don’t say that just because you’re my boss ) Email is a chore. Energy suck. Twitter/Signals/ etc are energizers…they’re interactions that leave me feeling smarter and more eager to go do the next thing…I look at what’s in my social media “inbox” and I get jacked to read it …I look at my email and sigh. By mark oehlert \| September 15, 2012, 2:22 pm

11 Replies to “Why Social Trumps Email: Reply to Alan Lepofsky”

“here’s a huge, fundamental, monumental difference between email and activity streams” Absolutely. I completely agree that activity streams are great for sharing things (ideas, answers, links) for everyone to see and that is beneficial to the overall organization (versus keeping information trapped inside inboxes) But I don’t see how that it related to your original post about feeling like you’re playing catch-up with email. If anything, it’s a lot harder to catchup with all the context shared in activity streams, blog posts, wikis edits, newly uploaded files, shared bookmarks, etc. Many people (not I) strive to achieve inbox zero. I’ve never heard anyone try to achieve social software zero as it’s impossible. Don’t get me wrong, obviously I love social software but I also think it brings with it just as many (or more) problems than email when it comes to information overload.

By Alan Lepofsky | September 12, 2012, 9:32 pm

Reading my email is not the hard part. It’s replying, filing, and deleting that sucks the life out of me. I don’t have that problem with social. I actually *like* replying to Signals.

By Michael Idinopulos | September 13, 2012, 2:45 am

Personally, it feels voluntary (and thus empowering) to reply in a Reply-Optional media (Activity Streams), and it feels reactive (and thus a chore) to reply in a Reply-Mandatory media (Email).

By Audrey Tang | September 13, 2012, 10:01 am

We’re now interlacing two different topics.

My response to Michael was regarding his tweet about having to play catchup with email, to which I stil believe you have more catching up to do in social software, as there is far more content there than in your inbox. This morning I “had to” check Facebook, Twitter, Google+, my internal Yammer network, the Chatter network for next week’s Dreamforce conference, etc. etc. That took me 30 minutes, my inbox took me 5.

The emotional side of this is very different. I agree with a statement such as “I find engaging with my colleagues via social software more rewarding that doing so via email.” Of course I prefer posting in public where more people can participate and benefit from the conversation.

By Alan Lepofsky | September 13, 2012, 1:38 pm

So IMHO, I tend to prattle on about this point when I talk about people using social software…that it is the difference between stock inventory and a flow. Inventory is email..its addressed item by item and only the inventory guy is doing it and if they don’t no one will. Social is a flow…more than that…it is a flow attended to by a network, a network that I helped construct. If I miss something that one of UK people posts, one of my US people will retweet it and I’ll see it when it surfaces there. Think about it like a Redditt …in email EVERY piece of email demands my attention..social software allows for my network to rank order the things I need to pay attention to…of course I first look at my Mentions then my Replies, then I have my twitters stream (for example) broken out into lists…I have a “Don’t Miss” column…that one I always check…I don’t always check my “Funny” column…email doesn’t really offer a way to so elegantly differentiate importance by source…I think I would quickly lose my mind if I thought of my Twitter stream as an Inbox. Yikes.

By mark oehlert | September 13, 2012, 6:27 pm

“mail doesn’t really offer a way to so elegantly differentiate importance by source” – I’d argue that email offers far more advanced flagging, filtering, sorting and foldering tools than streams currently do. This issue is, very few people (myself included) use them. With email you can flag things for follow up, move items into folders based on name, sender, size,subject. Colour code messages. etc. I’d love a TweetDeck UI for my email.

By Alan Lepofsky | September 14, 2012, 12:06 am

I see this really as “room based” or “person-to-person” difference.

You get the best and worst of both of these on email.

Because post-email tools are becoming social, it really means switching to tools that are more open and as audrey says, Reply-Optional.

Activity Streams, are getting really good at this over the past few years, but IRC rooms have had the same culture (collaborative reply-optional discussion) and integrations (irc bots) in a lower tech way for many years.

But my real question is when Michael I is going to go in-boxless…

By Luke Closs | September 14, 2012, 3:43 am

i take your point Alan and I think what it comes down to for me is that I still see email as something that I have to deal with alone and my social media flows are dealt with by a network of people that I’ve built.

By mark oehlert | September 14, 2012, 3:53 pm

Ok. First things first, I’m firmly on the social media brigade and it is my preferred mode of communication AND broadcast for the most part. To the extent that my social footprint is annoying to many. I completely buy and sell the collaborative nature of social software and the ability to swarm around problems as against putting it up on a closed channel. As we said with open source software, “When there are more eyeballs looking, all bugs are shallow.”

All this said, I think the “email sucks” stance does the enterprise social story more disservice than good. Let’s face it – email isn’t going away anytime soon. And people who prefer it won’t change because of a training program you run. Let’s acknowledge that our view of email is a bit myopic and unfair. As someone who’s participated in and run communities from the turn of the century, I can say quite safely that the first forms of collaboration I saw on the web came with software developers. On open-source projects. On huge mailing lists. To this day, email is a superior form of communication for software developers. Not too many open-source communities actually run on social software. And there’s a reason for this. The same collaboration pattern that Mark talked about works for developers on say, the rather large Open MRS mailing list. Or on your local Linux User Group. If someone in the US doesn’t respond, someone in Australia does. With the ability to choose your own client or service and with services like Gmail giving you a really brilliant interface to manage your email, it works wonders for several people. And you really need to talk to this section of developers and see how social software actually comes in the way of collaboration for several of them.

In theory, a lot of things that we speak of w.r.t activity streams and social software are also possible with say – an all company mailing list. Yes, it’s not very elegant – but a lot of people prefer that. By taking an ‘email is outdated’ or ‘email sucks ‘ we just polarise the ones on the email side of the fence way too much on the defensive and make change harder in the enterprise. Email is email – social is social. Each of them has their value. I’m not sharing a link to a performance review on my social business platform – sorry. In the same vein, I’m not going to crowdsource ideas on email.

In my view though, social software will always struggle to make the change easy for enterprises unless it plays well with email to help make the change easy for all users. This has been the single biggest reason for our insane success with social software! Unfortunately all paradigms from the consumer web don’t directly translate to the enterprise. Pinterest would be over the moon if 15% of all internet users used their platform. Most enterprises would be gutted if only 15% (the social media savvy) people were active on their primary communication platform. Their lies the rub.

Sumeet

By Sumeet Moghe | September 14, 2012, 4:24 pm

Wow, this is quite the firestorm
Let me clarify what I am saying and what I’m not.
I’m not saying that “email sucks.” Email does suck, but that’s beside the point. Taxes also suck, and so do colonoscopies. But I don’t believe in a world without email, just as I don’t believe in a world without taxes or colonoscopies. Email may be a pain in the, er, colonoscopic region, but it exists for a reason. I agree with Sumeet that it’s not going away any time soon.
The point of my post was more modest. It was really just a personal observation. I find microblogging gratifying and energizing in a way that emailing isn’t. When I post a Signal, I have more energy as a result. When I send email, I have less. Whereas email feels like a chore, microblogging feels like a contribution.

By Michael Idinopulos | September 14, 2012, 7:02 pm

Michael – couldn’t agree with you more (and I don’t say that just because you’re my boss ) Email is a chore. Energy suck. Twitter/Signals/ etc are energizers…they’re interactions that leave me feeling smarter and more eager to go do the next thing…I look at what’s in my social media “inbox” and I get jacked to read it …I look at my email and sigh.

By mark oehlert | September 15, 2012, 2:22 pm

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