“The human brain has an enormous capacity to process information, but is distracted from being constantly bombarded by all your senses all at once. Every second, the eye’s retina sends ten one-million point images. At the same time, your ear drums pass sound information real-time at higher-than-CD quality. If a normal higher-end computer was fed with the information from a human’s 5 senses constantly, and asked to process and react to them, the computer would overload from too much information because it can’t react as fast as the brain could.”
- Extract from Man vs Machine, CVB.net, Thinkquest

However, because the brain is overloaded with all this sensory data, as well as having to direct all your bodily functions like breathing, pumping blood, walking down the street…it’s distracted just a bit when it comes to processing other information. Throughout the digital age, there has been a trend towards aggregating or consolidating information, to make it easier for us mere mortals to avoid being lost in the overwhelming amount of information flying at us every day.

Since the 90s, there seem to have been the following phases of aggregation on the internet:

1. Search
   Starting with “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” which hand-selected the best web-sites and grouped them into categories, right up to Google’s algorithmic ranking, Search categorization has been critical for users to find what they need. And now, the web has become so rich and complex, that virtually every site and service has its own vertical search (Twitter, The New York Times etc), and search alone is not enough: rankings, tagging, bookmarking, and other methods of filtering are required.
2. eCommerce
   The net allowed consumers to buy products direct, without the pain and aggravation of having to physically visit a store, but at the same time the choice became overwhelming. Shopping “portals” like Amazon, Kelkoo, Expedia and eBay sprang up to compile goods and services by category, providing a virtually exhaustive selection of items. These marketplaces further evolved to include comprehensive product information, reviews, pricing comparisons and discounts, and to allow small businesses and individuals to add their offerings to their online malls.
3. Content
   As the amount of news, photos, music and video expanded exponentially online, sites or services that syndicated and organized this content became increasingly useful and popular, including Yahoo! News, Flickr, iTunes and YouTube. And users are now able to setup personalized pages that combine the best of their favorite feeds to get an overall snapshot of what’s happening in the world. Examples include iGoogle, NetVibes, plus Goojet and Viigo for mobile.
4. Lifestreaming
   Now that social media is the second highest category for time spent online, tripling in 1 year, there is an urgent need for sites that consolidate updates from all your friends and contacts without having to go check several sources, and to update your own networks from one place. FriendFeed, cliqset and ping.fm have started to fill the gap. In addition, as some services like Twitter have taken off, there are new services to help organize the volume of data flowing through them, like Tweetdeck, Seesmic, and of course the just launched…Twitter lists.

   And now, there seems to be a new wave of aggregation:

5. Communication
   There are a lot of buzz words currently flying around to describe this, including ‘enhanced inbox’ and ‘unified messaging’. But the idea is to consolidate all of someone’s communications to make it easier to find your messages and contacts, and a bunch of startups are springing up to attack this space. Some are to trying to work within existing email to add additional messaging/info like Xobni and Gist. And the other subcategory is focused on combining all of your communication services and social networks, like Threadsy, Raindrop…and of course, Silentale.

In the past, the winners in the aggregation game have been the players that have provided the best service in terms of both quantity and quality, with the largest number of feeds (including the most popular sources of content), plus the best presentation and usability of those feeds, and tools/functionality around them. The most popular services are also open, allowing external development and easy access. It will be interesting to see which winners emerge in the Communication space for the aggregation of messages and contacts.

Flickr image by @jakekrohn

On Monday, the WSJ published an article proclaiming the end of the email era:

“Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over. In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate—in ways we can only begin to imagine.”

Following my comment on the WSJ article, I wanted to further develop here my interpretation of email losing out to social networking.

The shift described by WSJ is pretty similar to what has happened with traditional mail over the last decade. Email has almost completely taken over personal correspondence (letters, postcards) and in the last few years, it’s even started replacing paper invoices and statements. As a result, our physical mailboxes remain only occasionally used for wedding announcements and registered letters, and are (most of the time) stuffed with paper junk mail.

Real-time and social communication will certainly follow the same process, eating up quickly the personal and “spontaneous” part of email communication. Email is already “passé” for Generation Y and Z who find it “unfashionable and outdated”. Boston College even stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen.

But three core characteristics of email should prevent its total cannibalization by social networks: it is traceable, “non alterable” and archivable, which is not the case for many social network messaging systems. As a result, I don’t see electronic invoices or serious documents transiting through Facebook, or even through Wave, where any of your contacts could modify them.

And then, there is spam… it will continue to occupy more space: just as email did not manage to make paper ads disappear from our physical mailboxes, Twitter and Facebook are a new playground for bulk marketers. Needless to say, it will become even harder to rise above the noise when you will have to deal with five or six different channels.

I agree with the WSJ though when they say that this shift toward social media promises to “profoundly rewrite the way we communicate”. What I foresee is that people will segment their communications across different media, according to their nature (personal vs. business, real-time  vs. asynchronous).

Maybe the surprisingly flattening stats of Facebook and Twitter in September are already a sign of users getting more picky about the channels they want to use. In the abundance of accounts and profiles, email will probably remain a “core or standard communication vehicule“. Think about it: even if students gave up email for communicating with their peers, they will still need it to shop online.

So in the end, we will communicate on several different channels, through several different devices. This will bring further efficiency as we will be using the tool best suited to our conversation, but it will also create new challenges as the quest for information, and just keeping track of all your contacts and communications, will become harder than ever in this fragmented environment.

This is why I am deeply convinced that Silentale, when building a searchable archive of all your digital conversations and contacts, is addressing a crucial and very fast growing need.