Ten Reasons Why

After the Sobig virus debacle last month, cries about the death of email made their usual circuit. Some RSS advocatesstarted hammering away at nails with their saw, trying to figure out how their New Thing would replace the much maligned Old Thing.
Jon Udell wrote a piece, titled RSS to replace email? Nah., which prompted this response from Stephen Downes:

Jon Udell expresses doubt that RSS will replace email. His mail argument is that his current combination of spam filters work fine (though his email account is groaning under the volume). “It would be nuts,” he writes, “to throw out the SMTP baby with the spam bathwater,” though some tweaking (to verify that the sender is allow to send from that address) amy be needed. I don’t agree, and here’s why. In general, it seems to me, technologies that allow other people to put content into your space are unstable. On the other hand, technologies that allow you to get what you want from remote locations have been much more successful. SMTP is a put-type technology, while RSS is a get-type technology. It doesn’t mean that RSS will replace email. But something will.

While Stephen is more or less correct about the put/get difference, I can’t agree with his estimation of their comparitive value.
As opposed to the put/get dichotomy, I prefer to think of it as the difference between sender-initiated communication and recipient-initiated communication.
What Stephen calls “put-type technologies” are successful and useful because they allow the sender/caller to initiate communication. For example, IM and phones are put-type communication mediums, although synchronous forms, as opposed to the asynchronous put-type communications of email and the traditional letter. Sender-initiated communication is valuable because it generates a much higher likelihood of response than a medium where the individual who wants to get information out has to wait for his or her recipient has to request the communication because it eliminates the discovery component of recipient-initiated communication. E.g. if I want to subscribe to your RSS feed, I have to know where to find that feed first. If I want to check out a book from the library, I have to be able to find the book in the stacks (and find the library!)
Of course, the risk associated with sender-initiated communication is that sometimes senders we don’t want to communicate with will initiate communication with us — phone solicitations, email spam, etc. However, people accept this risk because the inconvenience of filtering out the unsolicited communication is less than the inconvenience of the discovery component of recipient-initiated communication. When I need to share a bit of important business information with a colleague, I want the additional security of putting it in their inbox instead of waiting for them to come to me. When my loved one is in the hospital, I want my phone to ring — I don’t want to wait five hours or five days to check to see if I’m needed.
Jon Udell’s more recent follow up column on the subject, E-mail’s special power points out another value of email that I hadn’t considered, it’s instantaneous group-forming capabilities:

Every interpersonal e-mail message creates, or sustains, or alters the membership of a group. It happens so naturally that we don’t even think about it. When you’re writing a message to Sally, you cc: Joe and Beth. Joe adds Mark to the cc: list on his reply. You and Sally work for one department of your company, Joe for another, Beth is a customer, and Mark is an outside contractor. These subtle and spontaneous acts of group formation and adjustments of group membership are the source of e-mail’s special power. Without any help from an administrator, we transcend the boundaries not only of time and space but also of organizational trust.

Will RSS replace email? I’m with Udell; not a chance. I don’t think Stephen believes RSS (or whatever content syndication mechanism we wind up with)will replace email, but I suspect we agree that it will become an effective alternative for a narrow band of email functions, like newsletters.
However, I do believe our best geeks will escalate the cold war with spammers to provide better software code for filtering . . . and eventually the government will alos step in to attempt better legal code. I’m not saying it’s easy, but I am saying that sender-initiated communication mechanisms, including email, will not be replaced by recipient-initiated get-type technology.
You heard it here first. ;)

Greg Syndication & Aggregation