I have been obsessing on mailing lists lately. I know it’s not very fashionable, relative to blogs and social networking applications, but I honestly believe people spend more time interacting with groups of people through mailing lists than blogs or social networking applications. In fact, I did a study on this very topic a couple of years ago and when I presented the results showing that people still spend more time on mailing lists than IM or blogs, I basically received the feedback I must be studying the wrong population: “don’t you know email and mailing lists are going out, MySpace is in?” Admittedly, my sample was drawn from urban Seattleites. But, are urban Seattlites really that different from the average teenagers and/or bloggers?
In November I copied all of my personal email messages from gmail into excel and did some manipulations on the topic headers to code them by mailing list and whether I knew the person who started each threaded conversation. I imported the file into SPSS and found a few interesting bits of information:
a) I received 4107 messages, in 1806 topic threads in the month of November. That’s about 60 topic threads a day on average, with each thread 2.3 messages long (thanks to gmail, you can scan each thread all at once). b) 1771 (94%!!!) of those threads were started in the context of 16 mailing lists. I know I am on more mailing lists that weren’t active that month. c) In that month, about 318 unique people started a thread. d) I knew face-to-face, in person, by name, living here in Seattle, 76% of all people who started a thread in a mailing list (relative to 92% non-mailing list). e) a very casual perusal of topic indicates about half of these threads are random chit-chat, and the other half relate to coordinating projects or social events.
In sum, I receive many messages through mailing lists from people I know and I can tell you subjectively both my ability to coordinate projects and my social life would be over if I didn’t subscribe to these mailing lists. I know that I am an extremely social person who actively uses mailing lists to help maintain her social life….but am I really that deviant? Surely I’m not the only one who uses mailing lists so heavily? I know I have said this before, but I would really, really like to see some gmail data across users with different demographic backgrounds. (Dear GMail: please send me a very large data file.)
If I were gmail, or yahoo, or msn, I’d be very heavily investing in making the consumption of mailing lists the best experience possible…particularly acknowledging their role in social coordination.
