Posts Tagged ‘email’

I hate email. There, I’ve said it. It is distracting, time consuming and perhaps just one in ten has anything useful / interesting to say.

So I was mildly horrified to read new research today from TalkTalk which claimed that email would die out within ten years - will it really take that long? I feel that as a personal communications tool it has served its purpose and been superseded by IM, texting and social networks.

And I’d suggest that it is now the biggest workplace productivity sapper since Stick Cricket. I’d estimate that I spend at least 25 per cent of my time reading and checking emails that just didn’t need to be sent. IM is far more effective for quick communication and Twitter also allows me to connect with colleagues, journalists and suppliers - so why cling onto email for another ten tortuous years?

Lets begin the migration of our contacts to IM/Twitter and end this email madness ASAP. Who is in?

The morning routine: Come into the office, grab some cereal, sit down in front of the computer, log on and check your…..Email? Facebook? Twitter? Netvibes? The list goes on…..
 
Only a couple of years ago that would have been a stupid question with the obvious answer being email but nowadays the choice is much less clear. With internet users now having so many different accounts which do they check first? And more importantly which should they check first?
 
According to an article published last week in the New York Times, Nielsen’s latest study into internet use reports that ‘time spent on social networks surpassed that for e-mail for the first time in February, signalling a paradigm shift in consumer engagement with the Internet’. Of the social networks Facebook accounted for 12.7% of the share of total internet time last month – a staggering one in every eight minutes, making it the most used web brand in the UK. [link]
 
Ruder Finn is working with many of our clients at the moment to grow their online presence and increase the number of online channels they are utilising. As we continue to stress to them the importance of fully utilising all the opportunities online it is good to see statistics like this backing us up.

No, I’m not talking about the latest series of celeb bb, although I am embarrassingly addicted. I know its not the done thing but like some ghastly freak show I can’t avert my eyes. Damn those d-listers!

No, I’m referring to the news that the Home Office has announced that details of every email in the UK has to be kept on record by Internet Service Providers. The ISPs have to record who sent the email, to whom and when, and the data can be accessed by more than 600 public bodies, including the police, should they request to do so.

Civil liberty groups are predictably up-in-arms about it all but I suspect most people wouldn’t be that fussed. My emails are really not that interesting, so if some PC wants to read my inane ramblings about Tottenham Hotspur, English cricket and music then they can be my guest. I’m a gmail user, so I am used to my emails being trawled through anyway.

I think that civil liberty groups can sometimes get all het about things that they feel we should be het up about, when the reality is in fact, meh. And with Twitter’s recent move to the mainstream many people offer up incredible amounts of personal data every day without thinking of the consequences, so it is hard to stress too much about someone trawling through your emails.

What do you reckon - anyone outraged by this?