The Future is In Storage

I wasn’t going to write today. I wanted to make some coding changes to the blog and nothing more. But I noticed my prior post about eliminating email and I felt compelled to write a post today. It’s ironic that I just attended a talk about email marketing at SES by Sundeep Kapur.

In my prior post I wrote, “I have 107 MB on the local machine and 104 MB on the server. At present the inbox has 436 items and an additional 100 in the junk folder.” I predicted trusted networks would eliminate a lot of unsolicited email. But today, two years later, I have 1133 unread items in my inbox and 233 in junk mail. I also keep getting notices that my mailbox has reached almost 400MB, despite archiving anything over 30 days and burning anything over a year to DVD for “permanent archiving”. I write permanent in quotes because digital media is not permanently retrievable. I think it’s actually permanent in other ways, like permanently burned to disk or permanently lost or permanently removed from the server. So anyway, unsolicited email increased over the course of two years. I only digressed because I met an SES speaker who mentioned that he stored important files on SyQuest disks and now cannot get those files because the SyQuest drive is obsolete.  I am also in that same boat - permanent storage on magneto-optic discs - but no working drive to read them.

Another speaker reminded me about how you can send email through Facebook to people you don’t know personally. It costs one dollar per email to reach some people, more to reach other prominent people and $150 per email to Mark Zuckerberg himself. So here’s an oxymoron, Facebook Bulk Mail, a trusted network that should eliminate spam, profiting from allowing people outside your trusted network to reach your inbox!

 I got a lot of great ideas from Sundeep. He talked about great email headlines generating high email open rates; great layout and content generating better click through; timing and relationship building and so on. But here’s the big payday, if the content is relevant, people will want to read your email, engage with you and your brand and buy more stuff or join your cause, or help you out. 

Imagine the day – another prediction – when everything about you is so well understood, all your interests and friends and dining habits and location are granularly targeted by Facebook and other marketers right to the second on your truly personal, wearable computer. How will you manage storage for all that email that you’ll want to read but cannot get to in a lifetime? The future is in storage.