Human history is one of progressive improvement in communication. From the 20th century mail was a fundamental form of communication. The invention of email changed two things. It became cheap to send short mail, and delivery was instant. Email became favored for both corporate and personal communication. But email faces increasing competition. Chat, text messages, Twitter, social networks and even lifestreaming tools are chipping away at email usage. In this post we take a look at what’s happening and assess if email is in danger.
A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran a weekend piece entitled “In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop,” which focused on the stressful nature of blogging. Using our friend Marc Orchant’s death and Om Malik’s heart attack as examples, Matt Richtel built a case for Web journalism as the cause of certain health woes because of its non-stop, 24/7 real-time nature. There is no doubt that news blogging is stressful. But it is not just blogging. Real-time anything is stressful. Take TV news, is Anderson Cooper not stressed? Looking broader, what about air traffic controllers or traders on Wall Street? Any human being that has to make decisions in real-time will be under a lot of stress.
Last week Steve Jobs took the stage at the Apple town-hall meeting and announced two major things for the iPhone: 1) support for Microsoft Exchange and 2) the iPhone SDK. The Exchange support was a relatively unexpected move, but in retrospect it makes perfect sense. In order to unseat BlackBerry as the No. 1 wireless player in the U.S., Apple needed to have an enterprise story. What’s more, Apple has realized that the days when people carried two phones are over.
With support for the enterprise (one device for both home and business use), together with its utility as a music player, camera and Web browser, the iPhone is well positioned now to be that “one phone.”
The other day I was sitting in the bank watching a clerk copy information off a paper bank transfer to initiate a new wire transfer. Being a busy person I hate inefficiencies, and this was just plain bad. When I asked why the bank didn’t use an electronic copy to speed up the process, the clerk replied that using an electronic copy can create mistakes and cause liability for the bank. In the same way that people are mistrustful of electronic elections, they believe that a human being copying from a piece of paper is less prone to make mistakes than doing the same thing electronically. I smiled when I heard that, because I know it isn’t going to last.
On Friday, a massive outage occurred at Amazon Web Services that generated a wave of negativity and criticism in the blogosphere. Not long ago, Rackspace, one of the world’s largest hosting companies, experienced an outage that resulted in a similar reaction. When the backbone collapses, so do our favorite services. This makes us mad. It makes us say things like: Well, maybe we shouldn’t be using the cloud.
For decades in American households the most dreaded morning sound was that of an alarm clock. Sometime between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. a beep or radio music signaled that it was time to get up and head to work. But in the early 21st century, two things have begun to change. First, the alarm clock is going off a little bit later. And second, instead of putting on suits and driving to work, people are heading to the basement in their pajamas and turning on their personal computers. These are the early days of the new “Work From Home” generation.
This is a section of the All Things Digital Web site featuring posts from around the Web, from other Dow Jones properties and also original pieces we solicit. The section is now explicitly labeled that it comes "from other Web sites."
We are fully aware of the controversies around how linking and aggregating is done on the Web and we, in no way, are attempting to "scrape" original content created by others. Instead, regarding third-party posts, we are trying to point readers of this site to other posts from around the Web that we admire and are trying to do so in the quickest manner possible.
The Internet is full of terrific content that is not ours and we want to help our readers find it by making editorial suggestions--Look, Mom, no algorithm!--of posts we think are worth their time.
That is why we have made even more changes to Voices to ensure we do this in the most transparent and timely way. While we don't expect that everyone will agree with our policies, we have made changes that reflect our intent in pointing to content outside our site.
Because the site is wholly owned by Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, we aim to adhere to the journalistic standards of the best of the mainstream media. But, because it is run autonomously as a small online startup, we aim to exhibit the fresh thinking and nimbleness of the best of the new media. We want to be first, and sassy, but also well sourced and accurate. We will offer lots of opinion and analysis, but plenty of fact as well.
