Who said email was dead?

by | Jun 17, 2012 | social media

Remember a while back when all the social media bloggers kept saying how email was dead? No one’s using it anymore. Social media is where all the attention is at!

HA!

First it was Twitter who started sending me email digests. Complete with retweets from people on topics irrelevant to me.

Twitter's email digest coming to my @yaysuperspud account (which I don't use anymore by the way. I should delete it one of these days).

Then it was Pinterest. Basically, it’s like saying “Please still use us. Look – a cute photo! Food on a plate!”

My very important email digest from Pinterest containing absolutely vital information.

Then it was Foursquare claiming that places where my friends want to go to is news.

I don't really use Foursquare that much. I'm moving over to Google Places. But Foursquare does have the useful feature of telling you where your friends wish they could go. Wow. I'm richer for knowing.

Then Quora got into the action by listing questions about topics I never told it that I was interested in.

Quora's email digest. I have a question for them. Why can't you just leave me alone?

Here I was in the middle of removing myself from numerous mailing lists from shopping sites which I subscribed over the years and I get bombarded with digests from social networks. All within the same week, too. Monkey see. monkey do.

Which means now I have to log into each one to remove the new opt-out settings of receiving these digests. There’s no unsubscribe option within the digests. Except with Quora and Twitter (thank you).

Thanks for the information overload!

So whoever said email was dead didn’t realize that it’s a medium that’s still as effective as ever.

I know the social networks are only trying to keep us from getting bored and bringing some of that serendipity into the experience but I don’t need an algorithm bumbling it’s way trying to figure out what’s relevant to me.

Sigh. A side effect of technology.