A couple of weeks ago I had a cheeky dig at Google CEO Eric Schmidt for his slightly bizzare dismissal of Twitter as no more than “a poor man’s email” and yet now I read the news that “we are all in the process of creating e-mail 2.0″ so sayeth David Sacks (fouder of Yammer) with services like Twitter and Friend Feed. Further credence was leant to this notion by Facebook engineering manager Ari Steinberg’s assertion that
You used to e-mail content to people and you had to choose who you wanted to e-mail it to and you didn’t know if your friends even wanted to see it. Now you can passively put something out there and let people engage with it.
However, I’m more inclined to argue that this suggests that services like Twitter act as a 2.0 version of an RSS feed, not email 2.0.
Think about it this way: RSS feeds passively seed content to people who have opted-in to be notified when content exists that they might want to view/hear. Granted, unless a Tweet links to content there is nothing other than the 140 characters (where a genuine RSS feed always link on to unabridged content) but one can still choose to read the Tweet or over look it.
Twitter and its peers far more resemble the mechanics of RSS feeds than they do email. Email, after all, relies on a “push” mechanic whilst twitter et al rely on a “pull” mechanic and this is a very fundamental distinction I feel. One might contend that Twitter allows for responses the way an email does (where RSS feeds do not) but i’m not sure this is enough to argue that Twitter is the evolution of email.
It will be interesting to see how much momentum the idea of Twitter as email 2.0 gains and whether it begins to affect people’s perception or understanding of how the medium works but only time will tell us that. For now I just wanted to express my concern and displeasure at such a notion.
agreed. facebook is augmented email, not twitter.
facebook is replacing (within certain groups, and gaining more and more groups) email, and provides a far richer experience than plain email itself. it can be used as a single point to point, point to many points, open discussion and also as the ‘post it note left on all of your friend’s desks’, as – “hey, i’m not emailing this to you for your attention, but if you want to read it, its here” for things like photos and wall posts to others. that’s email 2.0.
maybe twitter is talk radio 2.0