Monday, September 17, 2007

who would ever use fuzzmail?

Normally I'd think to find the funnies in the Style section of the Mercury News. Over a bowl of Grape Nuts this morning, however, I found my humor in this Monday's Tech section in the form of a product review written by Craig Crossman titled "Fuzzmail gives importance to what you delete"

You know you're in for a good time when the product under review isn't even mentioned until the end of the eighth paragraph(!) of the review and even then the product's only mentioned three times total.

The premise is this: Fuzzmail allows a recipient to see how little much time a dupe sender spends composing and rewriting an email before it's sent. So, instead of seeing the finished product that says simply and politely "thanks for your inquiry, we're not interested," Fuzzmail would allow the recipient to see all the different ways the sender really wanted to tell the recipient to buzz off before doing the proper and polite thing. As a bonus, the recipient could actually see how much time it took the recipient to calm down and do the right thing.

To me, this begs too many two questions:
  1. Who, in their right mind, still indulges their fantasy response in the actual email window at the risk of prematurely hitting "send"? Isn't this the stuff of urban legends by now?
  2. Who else, being of right mind, would ever willingly subject themselves to the watchful recordings of Fuzzmail? Seems to me, it's the stuff of a sneaky spyware install, not something a person would consciously force themselves to use. While the recipient might benefit from a voyeuristic tour of how someone composes an email to them, there's no payoff for the sender (the one who's giving up the goods).
Crossman claims Fuzzmail provides insights into the composition process that are completely lost once the author hits the "send" button. Sure, there's plenty to online communications that's suffering for lack of context, but if Fuzzmail is the best response we've got to adding dimensions to our electronic communications, we're all in for a wild ride big trouble.

No comments: