Email, text and Metcalfe's Law (again)...

In essence, email is not person-to-person communication because very often the sender senses - and exploits - that their message is really being posted to an inbox, not directly to a person.

On the other hand, texting is more real-time and more like "talking". The sender has a view that their message is going straight to a person, not to their inbox.

[...] With email, a great deal of emotional emphasis is placed on sending. With texting, the emphasis is on the receiving. The technical reason for this is that texting has always been push-based. Therefore, a sent message is immediately brought to the attention of the recipient who will have their device with them at all times. This immediacy quality is missing with email, which is why the perception remains that emailing is to an "in-tray", not to a person..

Paul Golding goes on to speak about the small success Blackberry had so far - in his eyes. He concludes about the use of mobile email.:

[...] There is also the possibility of reaching a tipping point where the number of active mobile email users creates a shift in usage patterns and our sense of time-sensitivity changes. Suddenly we might expect more rapid reaction to information changes than we currently do. There is no doubt that once exposed to mobile email and the "connectedness" it brings, it is easy to get used to.

I think the big difference between SMS and email is the amount, the size and most importantly the cost. Where SMS is often used for one-to-one personal short messages which are worth 20 Rappen, email is cheap and you can get a lot which is not really necessary. That's also why I think email push is highly problematic.

Push services should always remain expensive for the "pusher" somehow otherwise I think we will be quickly overwhelmed on "always on devices" like the mobile phone. Certainly you should be able to accept a push service, but only for a special purpose and easy to cancel. Somehow SMS and the Pager share the same origin, and I wouldn't want a pager for all the email I get. But if I can chose a push service for some time, why not.

Personnally I believe that push is not that important, and that pull services (RSS is the best example) are still much more friendly to overstressed humans. - Give us a break:)

Via Russell