email is here to stay (baydin defrag 2009)
DESCRIPTION
During the Defrag 2009 conference, Alex Moore from Baydin presented some data about the differences in the way people use Twitter vs. Email and how those differences will lead email to change during the next few years.TRANSCRIPT
Alex MooreBaydin@[email protected]
Email is here to stay(with a few new tricks)
A little methodology
Generated statistics using:• Enron Email Corpus (252,000 messages)
– www.cs.cmu.edu/~enron/– http://www.isi.edu/~adibi/Enron/Enron.htm
• Random Twitter Corpus (490,000 tweets)– Twitter Streaming API (“Gardenhose”) – Collected since 11/5
Email allows rich communication
• Rich in Content• Rich in Conversation• Rich in Control
Rich Content
87.6% of Email is 141 characters or more
Rich Conversation Structure
• 41.9% of emails are “multi-recipient”– More than one address in To/CC fields
• 5.6% of tweets are “multi-recipient”– 1/4 multi-RT– Otherwise, spam-heavy
Rich Controls
• Only 0.5% of email messages were broadcast publicly to the entire company
• Only 1.9% of email messages were publicly broadcast to a full site
Can an old communications metaphor learn new tricks?
• Web 2.0 Technology beats email with:– Lower barriers to entry– Publicly searchable data– Immediate public validation– Opt-in publishing
Lowering the Barrier
• 140 character limit is a psychological boon – we worry less about sending a message
• Email is moving toward shorter messages– The rise of mobile phones– Conditioned from using web 2.0 services
Searchable Expertise Data
• Publicly searchable data is very valuable
• “Interesting” is incredibly relative inside companies – what’s interesting is what relates to current projects
Searchable Expertise Data
Searchable Expertise Data
Will Email get a “Like” button?
• Twitter users who “stick” are often the ones who get early @replies and early retweets
• Feedback from email is often private
• How can we publicly acknowledge and encourage public sharing of useful material?
Opt-In Publishing
• Mailing list traffic “fills up their email with discussions they don't want to subscribe to” – Just last night
• Mailing lists will become more like activity streams
Summary
• Email has a major advantage in the complexity of the relationships and content it can express
• Web 2.0 technology promotes public sharing and creates valuable searchable data
• Email will still be here in 5 years, but it will look like a combination of email and Web 2.0
References• Data + VM Image will be available after 11/14 at
http://www.baydin.com/blog
• Enron Email Corpus– Original Data: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~enron/– MySQL Version: http://www.isi.edu/~adibi/Enron/Enron.htm– PST file format:
http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2008/03/how-to-conver-1.html
• Random Twitter Corpus (490,000 tweets)– Twitter Streaming API (Gardenhose “spritzer” stream)
• A few papers worth reading:– http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/honeycutt.herring.2009.pdf– http://www.danah.org/papers/TweetTweetRetweet.pdf– http://www.isi.edu/~adibi/Enron/Enron_Dataset_Report.pdf
Thanks!• http://www.baydin.com• [email protected]• @awmoore