Virtual Fools

At the beginning of the fall semester of 2007, the University of Virginia’s Information, Technology, and Communication staff announced that student email would be eventually be moved off of UVa’s central mail servers and onto one of two new platforms, depending on student choice. They partnered with Google for Gmail and Microsoft for Live@edu.

Since I am no longer living in the University community, this announcement and its responses flew right by me. I only found out today, when ITC emailed UVa students and alumni, that the migration process would begin now. As someone who has attended the University at an interesting time in the web’s evolution, as a graduate who is a technology enthusiast, and as a student of digital media, I couldn’t help but think this whole process through. This is a personal tale of email in my life and I think it reveals some interesting things about the changing nature of communication–but not in the terms of the nuts and bolts. Programmers and marketers can only direct so much of the trajectory of a service, whereas users have a lot to do with how it actually gets used. I point to the way Twitter users adopted hash marks (#) for message tagging. Communication is not only being social, but being situated socially.

As an AOL customer in the mid 90s, email and Instant Messaging became inextricably linked. Your login name for the service was your email address and your AIM screen name. AOL customers could reach each other online or off because it was all part of one system. But what about people outside of America Online? If they couldn’t get them to sign up for their ISP, they might as well grab marketshare through something free. AOL release AOL Instant Messenger in 1997, following in the footsteps of ICQ but for a different crowd. Yahoo! Messenger released in early 1998 and Microsoft’s MSN launched in 1999. Which service you used often depended upon which part of the world you lived in and when you signed up for the service. In 2004,  survey by the Pew & American Life Project noted that 40% of Americans online instant messaged and I’m sure the number has gone up since then. So why focus on instant messaging? Because the rise of all these separated real-time from asynchronous online conversation, IM from email.  I got a mail.com address and a Yahoo! Mail account and used my AIM account for friends. In my junior and senior years of high school we were fortunate enough to have highspeed Internet, so I was always signed into AIM. This didn’t become common for a lot of people my age until having highspeed access at college.

Then I got a domain name. Virtual Fools.com popped up in 2001 and it seemed important have my name at my domain, as if there was something legit about that. I didn’t need someone else to carry my email because I could do it myself! Within a couple of years I realized that most webmail clients hosted on domains suck and started using Yahoo! again for virtualfools POP mail (which is when a client pulls all email off of the server). So it was back to Yahoo! until I was accepted into the University of Virginia. So now I used my Virginia mail (through Outlook Express in my dorm and webmail elsewhere) for email with school friends and classwork.

We did’t have “social networks” when I entered college, but they blew up when I left. MySpace was launched at the beginning of my second year and Facebook in the spring semester of the same. I didn’t bother with MySpace until my last year of college (and still don’t really use it). But the point is my central hubs of Internet communication through college remained relatively static. AIM for talking to friends, UVa’s mail for “work” and email with other people from school (now using Thunderbird), and Yahoo! for all other things email (especially newsletter delivery and signing up for web services). Facebook messages (once implemented) were only used for commenting on Facebook related things. But, at some point I realized I needed to get a “professional” post-school email address, so I grabbed a couple Gmail accounts and decided that’s where I was going to live in email land. This was the first time a lot of us realized we needed email addresses that used our real names, not our screen names.

Post graduation showed an interesting trend in communication with my school friends. The infrastructure had not changed–we still had the same email accounts, the same screen names–but suddenly I witnessed a big change. Most people no longer cared about being online all the time. My group of friends set up a Google Group to stay in contact, but communication became less frequent. Within a month of graduation my AIM Buddy List had halved. It wasn’t that people lost the ability to sign on, it was that a lot of them no longer needed to or cared. Turning the critical eye inward, I asked myself why I stay signed onto AIM. I wanted to be available to be IMed at any time (a strangely asynchronous function of a real-time service), I wanted to be able to reach my friends when I saw they were on, and I used Away Messages as a form of communication. Once again I turned to email for these things, but the traditional role of email amongst the people I knew wasn’t necessarily for sending links or comments. Email was still for long form letters, pressing information or sending things with attachments.

I have written about not getting people on board with new web services. My friends just don’t care about Twitter or Pownce or any number of the services I’ve signed up as of late. One thing I did notice, though, is that lots of other people had switched to Gmail and started using Google Talk, especially at work. Gtalk has replaced AIM for a significant portion of my friends. When I was actually working at a company we used Gtalk internally, so being signed on during the day was nothing unusual. I think that a lot of people can Gtalk during the day because they can do it from their Gmail account–a lightweight way of minimizing the footprint on the computer.

The first thing I did when I got my Georgia Tech email address for graduate school was get it to forward to my Gmail account so that I didn’t have to bother with it. Last semester they switched the Tech email client to Zimbra, which currently powers Yahoo! Mail. It’s pretty slick and I can imagine it would be useful for undergraduate students not already entrenched in some web service.

Bringing this all around to the original impetus of the article, I contemplate how communication would have changed had my primary school email been hosted in a Google Apps for domains environment. Would people have switched to Google Talk earlier? Would the “chat” organization of emails changed the way we felt email should have been used? Would more people actually use Google Calendar to share their goings-on? Or would things have continued along the same trajectory regardless of the technology? How are incoming first years making the transition from high school communication to college communication? How will the Google Mail and Live@edu divide manifest itself? And, lastly, will these kinds of multi-featured email environments “revive” email (and even IM) for those young ones who feel it’s outdated?