Could email deliver the “Internet of the Future?”
Find out how a 50 year old technology is poised to disrupt the dominance of social media platforms.
As a freshman entering the University of Michigan in the fall of 1995, I was given a key that unlocked the mother of all digital social networks: I received my first email address.
The experience was crude, and I had to access my email account using a text-based program running on the university’s Unix system. But it was also amazing, connecting me to a flow of information (and beer-related jokes) shared between my friends at the university, and their friends across the country.
Fast forward several decades, and email has turned into a punchline in the tech world for being old, bland, and easily abused. These days we have no shortage of new ways to connect with one another, from Facebook to Slack to Twitter to Snapchat, with each new method seeing itself as an “Email Killer.” And yet, almost 50 years after the first electronic message was sent, email trudges on as the workhorse of global communication, with over 3.8 billion email users sending and receiving over 280 billion emails every day.
A New Era for Email
You may be thinking “Emails aren’t the Internet.” Up until now, email has just consisted of static messages that we send or receive. However, that could be about to change. Google recently released an expansion of its AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) project, called AMP for Email, which enables interactive elements and real-time information updates within messages.
What is AMP for Email?
First of all, let’s clarify what AMP is, and why it was created: AMP was designed to reduce page download times and improve performance while browsing the web on a mobile device. AMP pages slash away the many layers of inefficiently programmed advertising services and processor-intensive page interactions running on most websites, replacing them with pre-approved components that are built for speed.
AMP for Email contains a subset of AMP components that enable interactivity within email messages with a minimal amount of processing overhead.
The Response to AMP for Email
For the most part, the announcement of AMP for Email has been met with responses from the tech press that ranges from banal intrigue to outright indignation. The following is a sampling of concerns that authors have expressed, which I will address in an upcoming Part 2 of this article.
- Blurring of the lines between email as static messages vs websites
- Possibility of introducing unblockable ads to the email experience
- Colonization of an open platform for profit
- Added security and privacy concerns
When weighing these concerns against the added convenience of interactivity and dynamic updates within email, some have wondered if the benefits are worth the risks. However, these arguments ignore the larger potential for email to evolve into an open, innovation-friendly social network, capable of disrupting the concentrated power of private, walled-garden social media platforms.
The Internet of Today: Dominated by Platforms
I was inspired to write about this topic by attending a recent forum titled “The State of the Internet 2019,” hosted by Civic Hall, a non-profit community center in NYC that advances the use of technology for the public good. The theme of the forum was summarized very well in with “State of the Internet” address, delivered by Anil Dash, veteran blogger and CEO of Glitch, a community of app designers.
Anil’s perspective addressed concerns that we’re allowing far-away platforms to decide what news and messages we receive based on algorithms that prioritize their own financial benefit. He gave an interesting analogy to food, where he asked us to imagine eating breakfast, lunch and dinner every day from a fast food drive-through that has no menu. Instead, the company chooses on your behalf what food you will receive based on an opaque selection algorithm. We don’t know what’s in the food, where it came from, and who prepared it. Anil asks in this situation “Is there any possibility of being healthy with that as your diet? I don’t think so.” In real life, people are starting to seek out restaurants that serve locally-sourced food, prepared by people from their own communities. Perhaps the Internet of the Future should be locally-sourced as well, with our apps, websites, and other experiences created and served to us by people we know, who understand our needs and concerns. He concludes “I hope that is the diet that we all get to enjoy.”
What should the Internet of the Future be like?…
Let’s imagine what characteristics the Internet of the Future should have, and how email can move us in that direction:
1. Social-First
With all of the problems that Facebook has endured, including mis-information campaigns, security lapses, and privacy violations, why is it that the #DeleteFacebook movement never takes hold? The answer is simple: It’s where the people are. Humans are social beings, and for many folks, leaving Facebook is the equivalent of self-imposed exile, cutting them off from friends and family, and potentially missing out on the news of major life events, special moments, and photos from far away loved ones. So if our desire to stay connected is strong enough to make us ignore all of Facebook’s missteps, it’s clear that the Internet of the Future must be built for social connections.
The good news is that email is built from the ground up as a Social-First way of connecting. Specifically, each individual person has a unique address on the Internet (a.k.a. an email address) where they can be found and contacted. Contrast that with the World Wide Web, which is Resource-Based. Every website or connected object has a Uniform Resource Locator (a.k.a. URL) or I.P. address. Therefore by design, you are forced to use a website or service of some kind in order to find people and connect with them.
Evolving the Experience
The email you’re used to isn’t the only thing that it’s is capable of. Email is an open platform, meaning that anyone can build new technologies on top of it, as long as the underlying shared protocols stay the same. This means that email can adapt to different styles of communication. One company that is doing just that is Spike. They’ve built a modern-feeling communication tool that turns email threads into chat conversations
One badly needed feature that email lacks is group management. You’re already aware of this issue if you’ve ever been trapped on a never ending email thread of people hitting Replying-All to say “Remove me from this list!” Here again, Spike addresses this with built-in group creation and management capabilities. Google Groups and Yahoo Groups also offer this capability, although having those capabilities integrated directly into their respective email clients would be significantly more convenient.
Another aspect of email that needs further development is in the prioritization of messages. There are very different levels of importance between messages from a family member like “I got engaged!” and messages from an acquaintance saying “Ugh, Mondays,” but each is presented in exactly the same way within email.
Even Gmail, which does a good job of organizing email into appropriate tabs, wouldn’t know that engagement announcements are more important than other, mundane status updates.
This is why social media platforms employ algorithms to sort through the flood of messages to determine which ones to deliver. This reduces information overload for users, but gives the platform complete control over the messages that people receive. If email is going reduce our dependency on social media platforms, we need smart algorithms that help prioritize and display messages in a way that puts users back in control.
2. Effortless
One of the greatest strengths of social media platforms is that they conveniently aggregate social connections, shared news, and personalized interests together in one place. There’s no need to “browse the web” in this context to find what you’re looking for. Simply scroll and interact with content you enjoy on the platform, and the algorithm will learn and bring you more. This is an effortless experience, and it’s what social media users have become accustomed to.
“Effortless” means the Internet of the Future should come to you, not the other way around. Fortunately, this is exactly how email works.
Email is already a place that aggregates social connections, as well as news and personalized interests via newsletter subscriptions from companies, interest groups, and social causes. The addition of interactivity within email makes it a robust, all-in-one experience that could reduce the dominance of social media platforms.
Some may argue that the same interactivity offered by AMP for Email is “only a click away.” As a User Experience Professional for over twenty years, I’ll let you in on a universal truth about experience design: “Convenience is King.” Every potential click requires a mental evaluation of its perceived benefits versus the perceived costs (time spent loading websites, losing train of thought, etc.) Through this lens, letting people take action instantly, without the mental evaluation process and costs associated with leaving their email, changes the experience entirely.
3. Personal
Email allows for people, groups, and organizations to connect directly, without requiring a third-party platform or service. This direct connection enables continuous relationship-building in a way that isn’t possible on social media, where algorithms may block messages from being delivered. This direct connection has helped one sector in particular to experience a bit of a cottage-industry renaissance: Publishing. In particular, editorially-focused newsletters, like Morning Brew and theSkimm, have grown in popularity, allowing authors to curate the news and wrap it with insights. I’ve been a daily reader of a newsletter called Next Draft since 2012, which assembles the best articles of the day, groups them by topic, and contextualizes them with the ironic wit of its editor, David Pell.
Furthermore, emails can already be personalized to each recipient, but the addition of interactivity transforms emails into hyper-personalized mini apps, containing exactly the content and functionality needed at that moment.
For example, Pinterest sends out personalized emails to users with recipes based on the content that they’ve already pinned. With AMP for Email, Pinterest users can browse curated recipe lists and save them to their boards without needing to leave their inbox.
4. Fast
AMP technology was created to accelerate mobile web browsing, but does it also speed up email? If you look solely at the process of downloading and viewing email, then no. AMP for Email messages will be slightly slower to load and browse.
However, when you factor in the entire user journey involved in clicking on a link, then interactive email creates a much faster experience.
Consider the other steps involved after users click a link. They must:
1. Wait for an entire website or app to load
2. Orient themselves to a new environment
3. Take any necessary actions
4. Navigate back to their email
Multiply that process tens or hundreds of times over the course of a day, and interactive email becomes an order of magnitude faster.
5. Private & Secure
Of course, we can’t discuss email without talking about it’s number one nemesis: SPAM. While SPAM filters have gotten markedly better in recent years, the problem never goes away, and the perpetrators only get more sophisticated over time. New York Magazine’s Vijith Assar bemoans that the introduction of javascript code “…is email’s biggest new attack vector since file attachments began carrying viruses.” It’s true that giving new options to spammers could open up a Pandora’s Box of problems. To sidestep this issue, publishers must submit a request to Google to receive permission to send AMP emails to users of Gmail.
To help solve email’s SPAM problem, email providers could implement a Connection-Approval system, similar to what you find on social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn. Every domain that you currently receive email from would be added to a whitelist of allowed senders. Emails from any new or unknown domains would show up with a Connection Request prompt, with the domain name shown prominently to avoid trickery. For example, see this fraudulent message that my wife received recently, impersonating Apple:
Spammers take advantage of the fact that most email apps hide the domain name of the send, leaving users vulnerable to deception. In this case, the only visible clue that something isn’t right is that Apple is in the “To:” field, rather than “From:” (the recipient’s email was hidden in the BCC field). The message instructs the recipient to open the attached .DOC file, which most certainly contains a virus or other instructions to defraud them.
Now imagine that prior to seeing that message, the same user saw this instead:
This prompt calls attention to the unusual domain name of the sender, which they’ve never received email from before.
There are more potential issues to discuss regarding privacy and security in AMP for Email, which I will cover in greater depth in Part 2 of this article.
6. Open, Decentralized, & Competitive
On the surface, the Internet is an open network, where anyone who wants to create a website is free to do so. However, with users spending so much time on social media, those platforms become a powerful gatekeeper to reaching them. Chris Dixon, a partner with investment firm Andreessen Horowitz, writes:
“Over time, the best entrepreneurs, developers, and investors have become wary of building on top of centralized platforms. We now have decades of evidence that doing so will end in disappointment. In addition, users give up privacy, control of their data, and become vulnerable to security breaches.”
Contrast this with email, which is completely decentralized. Email’s open ecosystem allows for new competitors to enter the market and attract users through innovation. Conversely, it also encourages existing players to enhance their offerings in order to retain them. In the spirit of being open, the AMP for Email code is published as open source, and Google has provided resources to new email providers interested in implementing it.
The key user benefit of this openness, decentralization, and competition is “portability.” That means that if you don’t like your email provider, you can pack up your email history and contacts, and move onto other providers.
Conclusion of Part 1
Email has been referred to as the “cockroach of the internet” due to its resilience, and ability to escape death. As I reflect on my first, crude experience with it, I prefer to think of email more like a caterpillar… ugly and unappreciated, but bearing no resemblance to the beautiful creature that it could one day transform into, ready to take flight.
At this point, you’ve seen a glimpse of how email could evolve into an exciting, new frontier of innovation for the Internet, alleviating our reliance on closed platforms at the same time. Or, it could fragment into closed, proprietary networks just like “the web we lost.” That is a worthy discussion, and will be the subject of the upcoming Part 2 of this article.
Sign up to be notified of Part 2, and other insightful articles…
What do you think?
What would you want from the Internet of the Future? Do you have additional concerns not mentioned above? Share your thoughts in the comments section, and I’ll try to address them in Part 2 of this article.
Thanks for reading.
You’ve made it this far. How about giving some claps?
