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March 01, 2005
not quite the end of email
If you've emailed me in the last 3 months, you probably think I've fallen off the end of the earth. A hard disc failure meant a loss of some vital chains in my email setup, which took a few months to restore, and now I start blankly at 3 months of email, which scares me, as there's lots I want to respond to, but I just don't know where to start.
To be honest, email has become a pain for the last 3 years. I've tried everything - multiple spam traps, different readers, online and offline, but nothing helps me tame the constant flow of flotsam with occasional gems of real messages. There are so many people I regret not writing to, it's just become a big burden.
Someone I know summed it up - email means work. I'm on IRC and IM to keep in contact with a number of people, passive attention on others from weblogs, RSS and flickr. I now spend my day in an RSS reader, not an email program.
So, what to do.
Well, don't stop sending me email. It does get read, eventually, even if my heart turns in gordian knots at not being able to keep up with replying. For quick attention pricks, please use my new plinger on my website. It's a tiny bit of shiny javascript and XmlHttpRequest (admittedly, hacked from the flickr code - mea culpa) that pushes your message into my RSS reader - by far the most likely place where I'll be. If email is the best medium, email me and then prod me with the plinger. Hey, pling me just to say that you're there.
This is how it appears in bloglines (and yes, it's password protected):
This initially came out of a thought about how such a system could be used in many ways - especially small groups, and one-to-many communications. RSS is great for this - bloglines et al let you save important messages, and you can always go back to the whole rss file to get all context. This also show why river of news or one-pane reading isn't appropriate now really important stuff comes in via syndication. I'll write that up soon, I guess - but rather than trying to build a serious scalable service, I just hacked something up for myself first.
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