Email is Here to Stay (Baydin Defrag 2009)

Email is here to stay(with a few new tricks)
Alex Moore
Baydin
@awmoore
alex@baydin.com

A little methodology
Generated statistics using:
Enron Email Corpus (252,000 messages)
www.cs.cmu.edu/~enron/
http://www.isi.edu/~adibi/Enron/Enron.htm
Random Twitter Corpus (490,000 tweets)
Twitter Streaming API (“Gardenhose”)
Collected since 11/5

Email allows rich communication
Rich in Content
Rich in Conversation
Rich in Control

Rich Content
87.6% of Email is 141 characters or more

Rich Conversation Structure
41.9% of emails are “multi-recipient”
More than one address in To/CC fields
5.6% of tweets are “multi-recipient”
1/4 multi-RT
Otherwise, spam-heavy

Rich Controls
Only 0.5% of email messages were broadcast publicly to the entire company
Only 1.9% of email messages were publicly broadcast to a full site

Can an old communications metaphor learn new tricks?
Web 2.0 Technology beats email with:
Lower barriers to entry
Publicly searchable data
Immediate public validation
Opt-in publishing

Lowering the Barrier
140 character limit is a psychological boon – we worry less about sending a message
Email is moving toward shorter messages
The rise of mobile phones
Conditioned from using web 2.0 services

Searchable Expertise Data
Publicly searchable data is very valuable
“Interesting” is incredibly relative inside companies – what’s interesting is what relates to current projects

Searchable Expertise Data

Will Email get a “Like” button?
Twitter users who “stick” are often the ones who get early @replies and early retweets
Feedback from email is often private
How can we publicly acknowledge and encourage public sharing of useful material?

Opt-In Publishing
Mailing list traffic “fills up their email with discussions they don't want to subscribe to”
Just last night
Mailing lists will become more like activity streams

Summary
Email has a major advantage in the complexity of the relationships and content it can express
Web 2.0 technology promotes public sharing and creates valuable searchable data
Email will still be here in 5 years, but it will look like a combination of email and Web 2.0

References
Data + VM Image will be available after 11/14 at http://www.baydin.com/blog
Enron Email Corpus
Original Data: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~enron/
MySQL Version: http://www.isi.edu/~adibi/Enron/Enron.htm
PST file format: http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2008/03/how-to-conver-1.html
Random Twitter Corpus (490,000 tweets)
Twitter Streaming API (Gardenhose “spritzer” stream)
A few papers worth reading:
http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/honeycutt.herring.2009.pdf
http://www.danah.org/papers/TweetTweetRetweet.pdf
http://www.isi.edu/~adibi/Enron/Enron_Dataset_Report.pdf

Thanks!
http://www.baydin.com
alex@baydin.com
@awmoore

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Email is Here to Stay (Baydin Defrag 2009)

by awmoore on Nov 16, 2009

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Email is Here to Stay (Baydin Defrag 2009) — Presentation Transcript