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Comment by Peter Feltham on March 8, 2013 at 11:04

Interesting bit of research and stats-gathering/mapping. More research is needed into things like cultural issues impacting the ways that people communicate, I feel.

The good news about email is:

• it's a low-impact information-carrying backbone for all, meaning that it is despatched across the Internet with a far lower priority than all the rich media streaming that goes on these days (which is more time-critical to receive and put back together seamlessly when watching a video clip or listening to music for example). The result is that emails are used as "gap-fillers" to flow data when all the streaming leaves a space, so the Internet as a whole runs more efficiently than would otherwise be the case. Clever those net wizards from the old days (it's always been that way)
• it's a ubiquitous technology available to everyone, which makes it very useful

The bad news includes:

• it's a ubiquitous technology available to everyone, so can, and often is, used for excessive communication such as within the org
• it can be a right royal pain to find and manage email - even with "power tools" like Gmail and its search capabilities: it's too easy for things to get lost or put out of mind and forgotten unless the user is well organised

Nowadays we have other tools available which are widely deployed such as the social media platforms which are useful for person-to-person comms. But most suffer from information overload and/or information screaming past and getting lost and forgotten about. So email still has a place, I think, and an important one. Not to mention the obvious - and useful - benefits of email in the Cloud so that synchronisation across all devices (desktop, laptop, tablet, smart phone) is both possible and automatic. This is extremely useful if upgrading a computer or replacing a lost or stolen phone for example.

A propos Doug, did you know that Google has a nice little gadget for Gmail customers called Gmail Meter? It allows you to set a period like weekly, monthly - even daily for the masochists, over which it will gather statistics about your own use of email. Besides the obvious number sent and received, it looks at thread lengths (traffic on a specific topic aka a Conversation in Gmail speak), time-of-day analysis, number within and outside the organisation and so on. It would be nice if it reported on countries too, but not as yet.

In my own case, on average it reported that 19.6% were internal conversations with other members of Ethos, 80.4% with folks outside of Ethos. I regard this as a healthy result for myself, since I communicate with many people all over the world on a variety of subjects both professional and personal - and because we have other collaborative toolsets that Ethos uses for issues such as project management, workflows, CRM etc, within which there are other more effective ways to have "conversations in context". 

Email. We take it for granted, but it's actually quite a big topic, I feel!