blog

While I find Facebook and its ilk aggravating — oh my God, will someone please throw a real UI designer at MySpace? — social media networks are obviously as powerful a shift in Web consumption as we’ve seen since its commercial inception in the mid-90s. 

That being said, e-mail is still the ultimate interactive medium -- and the ultimate way for marketers to build loyalty and foster one-to-one communications. While Facebook, Friendster, MySpace, Hi5 and the like may offer a big tent,  it’s a loud, noisy, distracting tent. To me, they feel more like an overcrowded club with the music turned up to 11, no privacy and no protection from weird strangers.

E-mail, meanwhile, offers a wide range of social options (it can offer one-to-many, one-to-one, group discussion and more), the ability to share files and video, flexibility (no inflexible UI to when you’re pulling together your message) and the ability to transmit ideas in a heartbeat. It’s no  coincidence that social media sites e-mail you when someone wants your attention; even they know that few users will check their portal often. The next step is for those companies to acknowledge that they need to push their functionality out to e-mail somehow.

So, how should e-mail transform itself to incorporate social media features? Certainly, Google’s inclusion of an IM function in its Webmail interface is a good idea–as is Yahoo’s effort to add text messaging to its mail service–but I think the process can go much further than that. I’m talking about nothing less than the deconstruction of e-mail as a unit of information and reassembly as a feature-rich utility.