(2003-08-22) Mayfield Death Of Email Lists

Ross Mayfield on the death of Email List-s. My response: I feel like you're writing about too many contexts in this rant:

• broadcast/commercial (opt-in) email: Chris Perillo and Joi Ito examples. Yes, since there's no way to distinguish a commercial message which someone has "requested" from one which has not been requested (spam), this is a nasty business. And RSS is a pretty good idea, esp if paired with an update-flag process (or smarter RssAggregator-s which "learn" the appropriate polling frequency per feed).

• email lists for public Group Discussion. I hope Yahoo Groups stays available - it's certainly a pain in certain ways but still a good/free service. The signal/noise problem is still there. But I don't see RSS as a great way to ask a question (though it definitely works sometimes). There are definitely email lists (hosted at Yahoo Groups or elsewhere) where I only join long enough to ask a question, then browse/search via the web. I think there's a need to have temporary/timely aggregation of people's questions and comments around topics. I suppose using Trackback with Topic Xchange allows people to have a blog and post a question on it for which they ping a topic just for that post. But when everyone is doing that, I'm not sure how much the signal/noise problem will be any better than it is now...

• corporate spam from SpewingMinistries (HR, CEO). It's hard to see mandatory-push models being eliminated. But I haven't been in environments where there's been much of this, so I don't have a great feel for it.

• corporate spam from CYA generators. If your team includes such a loser, and you're sharing a wiki, he'll probably dump plenty of CYA in there anyway. And most of those current email "lists" aren't centrally managed, but are simply cc lists.

Are you saying that email lists are obsolete for all these contexts?

Update: Ross Mayfield's reply notes that for Group Discussion, while some costs are reduced, new costs are created for participants to enter the trusted network. He also points to this May'03 piece by Tom Coates which was in response to this piece about the problems of holding a Group Discussion via the BlogWeb. One of Tom's points is that a Blog Thread doesn't have to capture every single possibly-relevant post, any more than a Search Engine has to return every possible relevant match to your query - it just have to have high odds of giving you the best stuff.