Innovation commentator

Steve Gillmor is a innovation commentator, editor, and producer in the enterprise innovation space. He is Head of Technical Media Strategy at salesforce.com and a TechCrunch contributing editor.Gillmor earlier worked with leading musical artists including Paul Butterfield, David Sanborn, and members of The Band afterwards an early career as a record producer and filmmaker with Columbia Records’ Firesign Theatre.... → Learn More

The signs are everywhere

Yet the signs are everywhere. George Colony sees social running out of time per day and people, however something will give. Email or phone? Email. People use social to determine whether you will answer the phone. People use email to communicate in the absence of more social metadata. In a word: will social absorb email or the other way around?

I spend in broad outline 75% of my computing time on the iPad/iPhone. The covert Blackberry in accordance with the desk in meetings has been replaced by the glance at push notifications as they light up the iPad or scroll in from the top if I’m reading or browsing. Email is however there, a strong tie or second by a nose in attention and even overt interruption. However what email doesn’t have more than outweighs its position in my time hierarchy.

Social history in email

There’s a social history in email, nevertheless it’s based on a structure of authority, presumed or if not. It’s an FYI not FOI as in Our. @mentions are a blend of both, alerting both the mentioned and those interested or following. Direct messages are the most email-like, yet even there they provide shared social history as a back channel commentary on group business. And groups go beyond email in avoiding forking and pruning without a consensus.

As tools just as Flipboard blur the distinction between the social channels, they make it harder and harder to carve out time for a personal channel opaque to search engines and realtime advertising. Streaming services disintermediate email by establishing a social relationship that avoids physical purchases in favor of app-triggered notifications. Businesses can now compare the accumulated value of social versus email, and are investing in the former not just in technology nevertheless people. Robert Scoble is better known by his Twitter handle than his email address.

Notification service for social

Today email serves as a notification service for social. I get social notifications both via push on mobile and email as an archive. The more efficient push gets, the more email becomes a redundant service. On iOS devices, I am now using push alerts to get to email more frequently than opening the mail client itself. I see the alerts flow through on the tablet or phone without having to log in, and use my security code only on items I have particular interest in. Swiping a missed phone call notification saves furthermore time, automatically calling the number back. These more efficient, actionable gestures are the new normal.

@mentions are the most valuable tool we have for this task. You can establish the desire for a connection with a series of such references, not just to a single target however to a group you identify and alert communally. Many of these @mentions already have bidirectional follows, making direct messages possible. New tools just as Chatter with its external group innovation let you expand direct messages into secure conversations. Email takes more clicks, lacks social metadata, and has no stable collaborative history.