What email should learn from the web
Links are the essence of the web. They create conversations in the blogosphere and define relevance in search.
Links are changing the way people write and probably the way they think too– a world with content but no links is like a world with noun but no verbs.
Linking is so important that blogging tools like ecto or performancing provide numerous tools for creating links based on the browsing history, search results, flickr photos, and so forth.
What does all of this have to do with email clients? Today, very little, and that’s my point. Outlook, Thunderbird, GMail and every other email client I’ve tried, whether web or PC based, has only the most rudimentary tools for creating and importing hyperlinks.
If linking to the web is difficult in email, it’s even more difficult to link to other email messages. The reply thread is a primitive kind of linking, but just try referencing two different email threads in a message. This is a real shame, because especially in business communication, links are extremely useful for providing data and background for the points in the email.
Email clients should make it at least as easy as blogging clients to create links based on where you’ve been, the results of a keyword search, feeds, and data in the corporate intranet.
Increasing the quantity and quality of linking in the intranet, and providing the ability to search over those links, would allow Google-like relevance algorithms to be applied to intranet pages. Then maybe we’ll be able to find relevant information as easily in our little intranets as we do on the internet at large.
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Very interesting Phil - I completelly agree. It may seem that there is an opportunity for a tool that injects appropriate links into pieces of writing as they’re being compiled with some guidance from the author.
Although over-automating something like adding links may remove much of their value because right now it requires a certain amount of effort to add a link to your blog to an external site so it is a strong ‘vote’ for that site. If adding a link is trivial or even automatic, the value of a vote is diluted and the realy good sites may be lost in the noise.
Mark.
By Mark Maunder on 04.04.06 3:43 pm
I wasn’t suggesting that the links be automated, just simpler. A good comparison is the way delicious and the firefox makes tagging easier. (I think of tagging as an extension of linking.)
By philbo on 04.04.06 3:50 pm
My knee-jerk reaction is that there isn’t more linking of email because what would you like to? Seriously, most HTML is served at a well-known URL, but most email is not, not least because web pages are made to be public, but email is made to be accessible only to its recipients. What happens when you forward a message with a bunch of links to someone who wasn’t privy to any of the referred-to messages?
Now, I agree that email with links would be very compelling. But I think it would need to be different in several important ways from email as we currently know it.
By maiken on 05.02.06 12:00 pm
Regarding what you would link to:
- when mailing inside the intranet, you would often want to link to information that lives in the intranet– in a corporate wiki like confluence, a corporate calendar, other email threads, etc.
Once you have a richer universe of intranet links, you can start to do Google-like relevance. The intranet becomes a more living web.
When mailing across the internet, you would want to link to internet content. Not as compelling but useful.
By philbo on 05.02.06 6:24 pm
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