E-mail as an Alert System

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Let’s wrap up this week of workplace efficiency discussions by looking at what email is becoming for many of us: an alert system. The screenshot above shows my personal email inbox at GMail. A quick glance shows that the majority of the messages are automated alerts from various web services: the Memphis Public Library, some social networks, blog comment threads, mailing lists. Online conversations are dispersing out of the inbox and into instant messages, Facebook pokes, and microblogs like twitter.

Alert tracking is a perfectly good use for email – you’ve got sorting and filing features, automatic response features, and with a GMail box you can retrieve four-year old snippets as quickly as you can type a search term. One problem I’m running into lately is that my reliance on GMail’s solid feature set causes me to route things through it which would be better off placed somewhere publicly searchable. Maybe a phone list should be on a blog or on a wiki instead of buried in my mailbox. Chats via GTalk could just as well be done on twitter and maybe they’d last longer that way.

Social Networks Pressuring Traditional Email, IM Channels (gigaom.com)
Do Social Networks Make Us Dumber? (geeksaresexy.net)
The Social Web Prays at Email’s Altar (gigaom.com)

Citizento

At least Facebook and LinkedIn offer notifications via Rss.. everyone should do that, apart from the fact that you can't just paste rss comment from every blog you visit in your rss reader, it will take too much time.
For Gtalk chats on Twitter, well.. they will become public. Good for broadcasting your ideas but not suitable for everyday comnversation.
MatthewBennett

I'm enjoying thinking of the possibilities of things like Disqus and Intense Debate for keeping track of my comments in different places but it will very much depend on how broad based they become.
Daniel J. Pritchett

Matthew,

Have you seen BackType? It is a 'comment scraper' that tries to find every comment attributable to a single email address and then aggregate them into a feed.

I haven't exactly *enjoyed* the service yet but it's certainly a new perspective on reclaiming the little pieces of our minds we're scattering to the internet winds.
MatthewBennett

Hi Daniel,

Thanks very much for that suggestion, that is indeed what I had in mind. I think debate aggregation is one of the next most interesting things we'll see to come out of the internet / blogosphere.
houltmac

I have to agree with this completely. Tools like Twitter search and BackType allow the internet to become smaller, like RSS did before that. With discussion aggregation I think these services could overtake the syndication meme.
MatthewBennett

Thanks! I have also come back to this thread after four months thanks to an e-mail notification.

I think my thoughts have developed a little in this area since I left my first comments. I tend towards using a combination of RSS search results and Google Reader. As an example, Twitter searches fed into Google Reader for things like 'spanish translator' have been directly useful for me.

It would also be great if Google Reader allowed saved searches. I find myself unsubscribing from e-mail notifications more and more and trying to shove them into Google Reader, which doesn't always work because not everyone has RSS feeds yet.

It also probably means that somewhere in my head, conceptually, e-mail is for longer direct interactions with people and Google Reader is for trying to sift through millions of news articles, blogposts and comments to find and keep up with things I'm interested in.

I think there's still lots of room for development though, we're not there yet.
Daniel J. Pritchett

I'm glad you enjoy these tools. I am also a very big fan of FriendFeed - my DISQUS and BackType comments are streamed together there along with my content from many other services.
Citizento

I agree about Disqus/ Intense Debate, they are a very good solution for keeping track of comment threads. Today i came back here to comment thanks to a Disqus email alert.. However i tried to paste the Disqus personal comments in my feed reader feed but it works just for your own comments and not for replies so it's useless! For now with Disqus you have to receive e-mail alerts. I would like them to publish a feed that notificates you when you have replies then you follow the link and read them on their site.
Daniel J. Pritchett

I can never find a happy middle ground when it comes to comments via
RSS. Either I'm filling google reader with empty one-post feeds or I
sub to a blogwide feed and soon tire of comments to posts I'm less
interested in. Have you seen any wrinkles on comment feeds you
particularly liked?
Citizento

I am in the same situation.
I think a few sites like Facebook and Linkedin publish a feed with messages/comments/events and you can just paste it into the reader and you can follow those sites in a rather satisfying manner. This is the best solution I think.
Then you have Disqus for the blogs that use it but it still relies on mail alerts because it doesn't publish a feed that covers all your replies.
Backtype is interesting but I can't see how it can track the comment replies that doesn't report your username.. But maybe I'm wrong..
For the majority of sites you just visit once in a while e-mail is still the solution.
Daniel J. Pritchett

I think there are some feeds available at the per-post level if that works for you. Click options->subscribe on this post.

If you were looking for something more complex, be sure and take it to Daniel Ha at DISQUS. He says he'll be setting up a UserVoice feature request tracking system soon.
Citizento

Thanks. The per post feed is nice but I would request a global feed for all Disqus conversation.
Hutch Carpenter

Agree with this Daniel. Interactions on the social media site. Email becomes a notification service and archive of activity on social media sites. Keeps communications in-the-flow. Gmail has become much more of a notification service for me.

FYI - wrote a similar post, Email’s Changing Role in Social Media: Digital Archive, Centralized Identity. http://bit.ly/3Lt7za
Daniel J. Pritchett

Thanks for the link, Hutch. Do you have any favorite GMail practices you can share? One thing that I'm really enjoying lately is having low-priority automated notices "skip inbox". They still show up in the unread count for their associated labels, but I'm no longer getting new mail notifications from them. This helps keep me from feeling obligated to check gmail every five minutes.

E-mail as an Alert System

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