"Email will be dead in ten years" ShinyShiny talks to Lady Geek

234-lady-geek.jpgLast week, Shiny Shiny met up with Belinda Parmar, a power-tweeter and the force behind Lady Geek – an agency that clues up technology companies on what women want.

Quoted across the media as a bit of an authority on this topic Belinda had a few things to say about women and tech: 51% of all consumer electronics purchases are decided by women for example, but women often get turned off by tech branding and tech retail. 50% of women will leave tech shops without finding what they were looking for… compared to 22% of men. Yet women, according the Harvard Business Review represent a bigger opportunity than the Chinese and Indian markets combined..

Anyway – mostly I was interested in what Lady Geek or Belinda as we’ll call her, had to say about email. Belinda thinks email will die and soon.

In 10 years to be precise. Since my groaning inbox routinely overwhelms me, I’m quite in favour of this vision of the future.

She thinks that not only is email broken and difficult – it’s also too masculine and too systematic. The “new email” or the new way we communicate with each other online will have to be more empathetic and more feminine if it’s going to work.
She’s predicting some more responsive and fluid form of communication, like instant messaging of some sort.

So Google Wave is the future then? Yes, it could be.

With the explosion of mobile internet, as Belinda points out, it’s so much more likely that text-sized chat chunks will take over from the lengthy paragraphs of email. Twitter anyone? Short format sure seems to be working well there.

I’m little divided here. I can see what she’s saying but can email really die? email is just writing and writing can be male or female or good or bad. I’ve sent and received a few empathetic emails in my time, it didn’t personally occur to me that the format is particularly male.

Any thoughts on this one? Do you think email will die? Or will we just find better ways of dealing with it?

See the LadyGeek blog here
And Lady Geek Twitter here

Anna Leach

One thought on “"Email will be dead in ten years" ShinyShiny talks to Lady Geek”

  • The majority of women I know sort all of their bills online and via email, preferring it to the not-very-reliable Royal Mail (who lee’s face it, nearly ruined Christmas this year).

    You couldn’t possibly fit my phone bill or my car insurance details in a “chat chunk” and I wouldn’t want them to. Even if they added attachments, who wants to save all their bills when they can easily get them from their Inbox?!

    Also, I would rather have a longass update from my friends overseas, as opposed to an hour long chat when I’m trying to shower and leave the house.

    I could see email being less important than it is now, but certainly not the end of it altogether.

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