Alex MooreBaydin@awmoorealex@baydin.com

Email is here to stay(with a few new tricks)

A little methodology

Generated statistics using:• Enron Email Corpus (252,000 messages)

– www.cs.cmu.edu/~enron/– http://www.isi.edu/~adibi/Enron/Enron.htm

• Random Twitter Corpus (490,000 tweets)– Twitter Streaming API (“Gardenhose”) – Collected since 11/5

Email allows rich communication

• Rich in Content• Rich in Conversation• Rich in Control

Rich Content

87.6% of Email is 141 characters or more

Rich Conversation Structure

• 41.9% of emails are “multi-recipient”– More than one address in To/CC fields

• 5.6% of tweets are “multi-recipient”– 1/4 multi-RT– Otherwise, spam-heavy

Rich Controls

• Only 0.5% of email messages were broadcast publicly to the entire company

• Only 1.9% of email messages were publicly broadcast to a full site

Can an old communications metaphor learn new tricks?

• Web 2.0 Technology beats email with:– Lower barriers to entry– Publicly searchable data– Immediate public validation– Opt-in publishing

Lowering the Barrier

• 140 character limit is a psychological boon – we worry less about sending a message

• Email is moving toward shorter messages– The rise of mobile phones– Conditioned from using web 2.0 services

Searchable Expertise Data

• Publicly searchable data is very valuable

• “Interesting” is incredibly relative inside companies – what’s interesting is what relates to current projects

Searchable Expertise Data

Searchable Expertise Data

Will Email get a “Like” button?

• Twitter users who “stick” are often the ones who get early @replies and early retweets

• Feedback from email is often private

• How can we publicly acknowledge and encourage public sharing of useful material?

Opt-In Publishing

• Mailing list traffic “fills up their email with discussions they don't want to subscribe to” – Just last night

• Mailing lists will become more like activity streams

Summary

• Email has a major advantage in the complexity of the relationships and content it can express

• Web 2.0 technology promotes public sharing and creates valuable searchable data

• Email will still be here in 5 years, but it will look like a combination of email and Web 2.0

References• Data + VM Image will be available after 11/14 at

http://www.baydin.com/blog

• Enron Email Corpus– Original Data: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~enron/– MySQL Version: http://www.isi.edu/~adibi/Enron/Enron.htm– PST file format:

http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2008/03/how-to-conver-1.html

• Random Twitter Corpus (490,000 tweets)– Twitter Streaming API (Gardenhose “spritzer” stream)

• A few papers worth reading:– http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/honeycutt.herring.2009.pdf– http://www.danah.org/papers/TweetTweetRetweet.pdf– http://www.isi.edu/~adibi/Enron/Enron_Dataset_Report.pdf

Thanks!• http://www.baydin.com• alex@baydin.com• @awmoore