More E-mail vs. RSS

I spent the better part of an hour last night talking with two of my best buddies, who also happen to be unix system admins, about the use of RSS as an alternative to E-mail.

Despite all our attempts to figure out a solution that was viable, we kept hitting dead ends. For the most part, however, the obstacles are not technical at all, but rather are social. Driving adoption of something like RSS-based e-mail is the main hurdle. Simplicity and ease-of-use is another large trap.

Yesteday, I received a trackback to the Top 10 list I quoted. The guys on the end of that conversation had some interesting points to make in favor of e-mail. It seems worthwhile to mention them here.

• "Email is a de-facto lowest common denominator - With few exceptions, when I send an email I know that the recipient will be able to open and read the contents. [...] to expect that we’re all going to switch any time soon to RSS, or instant messaging, or whatever alternative technologies exist - is optimistic to say the least."

• Email is asynchronous - "Something that instant messaging advocates often ignore, I think, is that email is an asynchronous medium - it doesn’t matter if I’m not logged in at the time when the message arrives, because it will be stored for me to deal with later."

• Email is cross-cultural - "Despite the scope for misunderstanding and miscommunication, email provides an acceptable sense of distance to allow for a relationship to develop - the language of messages can casualise over the course of the interaction, whereas it’s far more difficult to be as formal in an instant message."

• Email is auditable - "In an ideal world, these situations wouldn’t arise in the first place - but we live in imperfect times, so there’s sometimes a valid place for a communication tool with a built-in audit trail."

Source: infosential.com, "Reports of the death of email have been greatly exaggerated"

This raises a point that I was making yesterday with my friends. The substitution of RSS for e-mail usually implies the use of some other medium, namely IM, as the method for spontaneous conversations. IM is wildly popular, but it's also no substitue for what e-mail is (not yet anyway).