The email addiction

Reported by Science Library Pad:

email, the killer app that is unkillable

E-mail is not an optimal tool for many types of collaboration, but it is very difficult to get people to move away from using email.  In fact it’s difficult to get people to send less email and to stop checking their inbox every six seconds.

Two salient quotes from a recent >Globe and Mail article

“The real problem of e-mail is people, and people are not a solvable problem.” [quote from Merlin Mann of InboxZero.com]

—

In one 2001 study, [Thomas Jackson] found that employees reacted to 70 per cent of incoming e-mails within six seconds of their arrival. Dr. Jackson calls it “an addiction.” Problematically, it took them 64 seconds to recover their train of thought after the interruption, a dismal stat considering numerous e-mails flowed in every five minutes.

Globe and Mail – Confessions of an inbox obsessive – July 15, 2011

Posted on 19th of July,
http://scilib.typepad.com/science_library_pad/2011/07/email-the-killer-app-that-is-unkillable.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ScienceLibraryPad+%28Science+Library+Pad%29

State of the Internet in 2010

• 1.9 billion people send 294 billions emails every day
• 255 millions of websites
• 152 millions of blogs
• 2 billions of users of internet worlwide
• 25 billions of tweets in 2010
• etc.

According:
http://www.focus.com/images/view/48564/

Google Wave: the email revolution, at last?

“We send 247 billion emails a day (…) but the basics of email haven’t evolved much since the first one was sent in 1971”

“Google’s answer to this problem is Google Wave”

“Still, Wave is only in a beta or preview state at the moment. And the principle sounds promising. You can imagine using it to collaborate on a article (we nearly wrote this one that way) – someone could write a section, others could comment or edit sentence-by-sentence, and there would be a permanent record of who made what changes and, most importantly, why. Or a project team could use it to keep a record of issues and their resolutions. It’s so powerful that you can run mini programs inside the Wave – an opinion poll, for instance, or a calendar.”

“A couple of types of use are already emerging. One is to use Google Wave to collaboratively take notes during a lecture, talk or conference”

“Collaborative use within the workplace also seems to be a major future role. Tim Panton from Phonefromhere.com has spotted the potential for using Wave with remote workers”

Coles, Malcolm & Belam, Martin. Say Hello to Google Wave! on FUMSI ,  January 2010. online: http://web.fumsi.com/go/article/share/4438

Google Wave live demo on YouTube:

http://wave.google.com/about.html#video

Scientists & Internet

“it’s not without some irony that the brain child of scientists – the internet – is now developing at such a rate, that we hopelessly outpaced scientists feel the urge to plead to a private company to not abandon us poor scientists. (…) Embarrassingly, I would posit that most of today’s scientists use the internet for science at roughly the level of 1994: Browsing and e-mail. However, this should not keep us from joining the evolution of Web 3.0 and help develop Science 2.0...”

Will science ride the Google Wave into the 21st century?, http://bjoern.brembs.net/news.php?item.521.3=