Capping IT Off
Although we predicted that e-mail would die this year it seems it is rather persistent. However besides overloading people with e-mails and setup a competition “Who is the person who could CC the most people”, there is one good thing you can do with it: use it with Posterous.
Posterous is a service that distributes its content in a way that seems to be uncool at first sight. Simple: sending e-mail is not something the cool kids do, everybody is sending e-mail on a daily basis. Therefore my first feelings about Posterous were that it was totally not cool or useful. We are struggling with an immense amount of e-mails (with only a small percentage that is really useful) and then there is Posterous, a new service that seems to be e-mail centric.
By using such an uncool medium as e-mail, Posterous is quite cool. It is a really easy way to send your content to a lot of networks. It is an easy method to get people to start a blog or to share their photos and videos on several sites. Often senior management does not get what a blog is, or how sites like YouTube, Flickr or Twitter work, however they are masters of their inbox and understand e-mail very well. Now these people can also blog, they do not have to learn a new trick, they only have to e-mail to a certain e-mail address. The only thing they have to be aware of, is the results of sending a simple e-mail to Posterous
Besides an easy introduction to social media for the digital illiterated, e-mail is also a service that is not blocked in most offices or countries (while something like Facebook or YouTube is often blocked). E-mail to certain domains is hardly ever blocked, and at almost every
device that has an internet connection you will have the possibility to
send an email to Posterous and distribute your content.
But still: it’s e-mail. So it’s a bit uncool.
Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter, Delicious or off course on Posterous.
About the author
Rick is on a day to day basis working on social media (strategy) cases for several (Fortune 500) clients. He lives and loves social media, helping people and enterprises in using social media in a way that adds value for them. He also gives guest lectures at several universities to make students aware of the impact social media will have on their life in general and on enterprises in particular in the near and not so near future. Is he a geek? Well… yes. A geek with a social life though. Even one with a wife and a young son, who’s first English words were ‘Social media’.
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This reminds me of the time when firewalls became essential, and anything but HTTP through port 80 was allowed. All of a sudden, several new “HTTP tunneling” protocols came into existence, such as IIOP over HTTP, but AMF and SOAP are similar examples.
My point is that we now might see new applications reuse the trusted social protocols: SMTP, POP3 and IMAP. Could be interesting!
Good post, Rick!