CTO Articles
Published in IT World
E-Business in the Enterprise – June 08, 2004
E-mail - the end of a metaphor?
By Sean Mc Grath
I have recently spent some time playing with Google's new e-mail service gmail[1]. I already have a web-based e-mail system compliments of my mobile phone provider[2]. I use their service regularly - mostly from abroad - and it was interesting to compare/contrast its features with those of gmail. As Internet access points continue to multiply like supercharged digital rabbits, I find myself more and more tempted to adopt a web-based mail paradigm as my dominant mail platform. I have not made the switch yet but, I suspect the day is coming.
Anyway, at one stage during my webmail investigations, I had cause to send a message from the one webmail system to another. This caused a thought to grab hold of my faculties. A thought that refused to let go until such time as I wrote it down.
The thought is this: isn't it slightly absurd to "send" a message from one part of the Internet cloud to another part of the Internet cloud? What does that achieve from a users perspective? All that has really happened is that the e-mail message has moved from one URL in the cloud, to another URL in the cloud. The user will still retrieve the message using a browser - a device to which all URLs are basically the same.
Given that the users experience of web-based e-mail is via message URLs, why bother sending anything around at all? Why not just send the links themselves? Why move the message?
Look at all the e-mail sloshing around the Internet pipes. How much of it do you think is traffic moving from one webmail system to another? Put another way, how many terabytes of bandwidth are consumed moving mail from one URL to another for no significant user benefit? I don't know the numbers but I suspect they are large.
Let us step back a little and think about how we got into this position. I think the current state of affairs can be traced back to the very origins of e-mail. In the days of snail-mail, content physically moved from the sender to the recipient. Inside the manila envelope you received from your buddy were sheets of paper that once belonged to your buddy, were written on by your buddy and then the original copies were dispatched to you by your buddy.
In the early days of e-mail, we effectively saw the computerization of snail-mail in a way that kept the physical world metaphor largely intact. In other words, the core idea of paper "movement" was replicated into a digital environment. In the world of bits, we assembled the original message into ones and zeros and then *sent* these ones and zeros to the intended recipient.
Under the hood of course, the metaphor crumbles somewhat. In reality, e-mail is more like fax than snail-mail. The original ones and zeros never leave your computer, they are replicated - perhaps multiple times - on their way to the recipient.
Webmail systems break the snail-mail metaphor even further. In a webmail system, you never take delivery of a message. Instead, you look at your messages using a peeking device known as a browser. The messages themselves stay housed in the cloud until such time as you delete them.
Systems like gmail look set to break the metaphor even further. With 1G-byte of storage space, maybe you will never bother to delete an e-mail. Why not simply archive it off into the bottomless pit of storage space at your disposal?
It seems to me that from the very beginning of e-mail, we have slowly but surely been moving away from the physical mail metaphor. What are we replacing it with? I don´t think we know. We are making it up as we go along, bobbing along on a sea of market forces.
If I had to guess (and I do because every article needs an ending) I would suggest we are moving from an e-mail-as-mail metaphor to an e-mail-as-publishing metaphor. What does it mean to publish something on the Web? It means putting some useful content at the end of a URL from whence it can be retrieved. In a web-based word, what does it mean to send a message? Is sending a message anything other than publishing a Web page to a restricted audience? Is sending a message anythin other than publishing a URL?
Something to think about perhaps the next time you are waiting for your e-mail to download.
[1] http://www.gmail.com
[2] http://www.o2.ie