E-mail – a ‘Timex watch in the digital age’?

Dinosaurs in the Space age?

In Die Hard 4.0, Timothy Olyphant’s character, Gabriel, calls John McClane (Willis) a ‘Timex watch in a digital age’. A couple of days back a few thoughts wafted through my mind while sharing an interesting link that I read about with my colleagues at work. I happened to read about Google’s acquisition of On2 Technologies, and thought it would be interesting to share with my team and others who work in field of codecs/video compression. Well, there I go – copy link from the browser, paste into new mail in Outlook, and write a quick note about what the link is about. And it then that I thought, “Heck! This is so 1990-ish!” You know, copy-and-paste links from browser to mail-client. There ought to be a more ‘natural’ way of sharing interesting stuff at work! Twitter and Facebook (not to mention Friendfeed) have revolutionized the way information is shared over the Internet. In fact, they embody the true spirit of ‘sharing’. Over e-mail, you only send the information to (some of) your contacts. Of course, they in turn could forward it to their friends. But there’s two problems with that. Many of them may be too busy to do that (euphemism for lazy?). Or if you’re like me, then you just delete anything that begins with ‘Fwd:’ in the mailbox. On the other hand, sharing on Facebook or Twitter is so natural. I may not directly know Rahul’s friend, but I can see ‘Rahul commented on Tejas’ link’ and well, I click through to see the comment (and the link). Same thing with the ‘Retweet‘ on Twitter. The viral nature of these services is what is central to sharing.

Back then to the incident about sharing some stuff with my work colleagues. I wonder, why is Outlook still stuck in the Stone Age, figuratively speaking? Why can’t I share stuff with my colleagues in a secure, safe manner directly from my browser? I mean, instead of copy-and-paste, why can’t we have a scenario where it goes like this:

1. Pooja is browsing the Internet and comes across an interesting link/photo/app that she’d like to share with her team at work.
2. She uses MSSharePoint – a browser plugin that pulls in your data/address book from Outlook and allows you to share stuff with a group of friends/team.
3. She clicks on the MSSharePoint button, that shows her the list of Outlook contacts she can choose from (or Groups she’s already created), to share the link with. She selects the contacts, clicks OK and poof! The link’s shared with her colleagues/team!

Now, Yammer is something that looks to accomplish this – essentially it’s Twitter for enterprises. But the point I’m making is slightly different. E-mail as it is today needs to evolve into something more ‘social’. Why can’t enterprise e-mail be about sharing information? Mind you, sharing, in a viral sense. It’d hugely help employees find information they need, but don’t know whom to ask! Already, you see a shift from E-mail to Twitter and Facebook. People are increasingly using direct messages (DM) on Twitter to say something to their friends. OK, e-mail will not die, not least in a corporate setting, where you do need records of stuff, need to communicate with team-members, clients, and vendors. But there is no reason why e-mail (enterprise e-mail, in particular) should just be limited to that! Generally, e-mail seems to be the step-child of Web2.0 – most social services don’t try to integrate e-mail! lifeIO may be trying to change that, and we’ll watch out for more on that. Xobni is an Outlook plug-in that’s about finding people and e-mail, but that’s more search than social.

What do you all say? What would you like to see in the e-mail client you use at work? Do you know of any existing services/apps/plug-ins that tackle this ‘sharing’ problem?

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