When it doesn’t actually contain email as most folks think of it — letters from Aunt Molly, correspondence with friends, business memos and the like — but system notifications, warnings, updates, etc.
With every birthday reminder, bill confirmation, new friend, direct message, password recovery, and mailing list, the content of our inboxes becomes less and less a means of communication and more and more a record of all we do online. Email is the lowest common denominator of digital identity. It’s our web keychain. It’s the catch-all of our online lives.
But if inboxes don’t fundamentally change in order to adapt to their new role as the keeper of myriad transactions across the entire web, they’ll be obsolete.
Yes, yes, yes. We need stuff — GMail filters, but a lot more powerful — to aggregate, filter, shuffle, analyze, and make use of all that info. We need to know about it all, and email is the way it’s getting to us. We just need a better way to turn that data into information. And the email system seems to be the way to do it.
(via Google Blogoscoped)