I just responded to the post by TED curator Chris Anderson - and I think it bears re-posting.

If you don’t want to actually read Chris’ orignal post, which you should - the thumbnail is a call to make our email easier to deal with.  For so many of us these days, email is central to both our jobs and our social lives.  And using it sucks.  Chris is more eloquent and detailed in his assessment.

My response:

I see two very clear solutions for all of the email problems discussed in this great post.

1. Email content technology should be brought into the 21st century.  XHMTL/CSS/JS just like the web.  This will allow an existing base of developers to customize solutions that work specifically for business or personal needs.  Imagine being able to embed a quick survey or other type of form directly into an email, or even having mini-apps inside of emails.

2. Short of this - creating smarter email reading software with better sorting and discovery functionality would make our email-time more productive.  Gmail has made excellent strides in terms of prioritizing emails, but I also don’t want every person who has emailed me in my address book.  Apple Mail has great features for adding to-do’s and calendar items from the body text of emails.  Neither platform, however, has the kind of robust search and sort tools I think we all need.  How about being able to sort by multiple fields - name and date and subject? Or how about letting me sort by a date range?  How about plain language boolean searches that aren’t tied to just subject or just sender, but maybe both?  I could go on and on.Email software should be one of the most robust pieces of software you use - and yet it simply is not.

Email content should be at least as robust as the rest of the web and yet it’s stuck around 1997.Everything else mentioned above (in the comments and original post) that’s not about the tech is mostly about etiquette and/or agreeing upon some acronyms.  These points are also very important, but will happen much more gradually and would easily be supported if only email would adopt basic web standards…

 

 

Posted via email from these are the things I like | Comment »