 Friday, June 11, 2004
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Ed Brill has a thoughtful essay about the current email and RSS brouhaha, and I completely agree with his conclusions.
Will RSS (for the uninitiated, if there are any, it's how you "subscribe" to a weblog -- RSS readers can aggregate the content provided by that little 'XML' button over there to the left) replace email? ... is the thrust of the debate. Personally, I'd be very surprised, and, moreover, I'm somewhat astonished that this question even comes up.
Now, I think RSS and weblog aggregators are mind-bogglingly useful, and I peruse mine (I use RSSReader) every day. But RSS is about pull, not about push. I set up my subscriptions and watch what people post. Email, by contrast, is about push: somebody sends me something and I respond, sometimes. To me it's like asking whether word processors will replace spreadsheets: apples and rutabagas.
And it misses the point: the real question is, can email be replaced by anything? Well, maybe not replaced -- but perhaps minimized. I'm fascinated for example by the notion of shared project workspaces such as Groove where Andrew Mahan claims that internal emails have been virtually eliminated in favor of focused collaborations.
The point is, it's not about the technology, in the end -- it's about what people are trying to do, and then building technology that best fits the task at hand.
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May Jul
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