Email allows for rich content, conversations, and controls compared to newer communication methods like Twitter. While technologies like Twitter have advantages in lowering barriers to entry and creating publicly searchable data, email is still widely used and will continue to be used in the future, though it may incorporate more aspects of social media platforms. The document examines usage statistics from email and Twitter datasets and considers how email could adopt features like public acknowledgement of useful messages as social media does to remain a relevant communication method.

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

2. 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

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

4. Rich Content 87.6% of Email is 141 characters or more

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

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

10. Searchable Expertise Data

11. Searchable Expertise Data

12. 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?

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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

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