Last week, I received a video email. I’ve gotten a few of them in the last year or so, and I don’t like them.

Yes, they are very personal. You can see expressions and context completely lacking in the written word. And I admit they do have a “geeky cool” factor to them which really should appeal to my inner tech nerd.

But I had to spend several minutes to come up with two (pretty weak) things to like about them. Which I guess says it all.

Why do I not like them? Keep in mind that some of what I will say dates me. I am in my forties, after all.

The biggest thing I didn’t like was that I couldn’t view it on my phone. The service used by the sender converted the video into Flash. I can’t view Flash video on my iPhone. The email was an RSVP for an event, and that day was the deadline to respond. I received the email in the morning, and I couldn’t “read” it until I got home in the evening. That was annoying. And not a minor annoyance considering the popularity of the iPhone.

The other thing I didn’t like was that it was video. I read very fast. In the time it took me to watch the video, I could have read and responded to the email.

Maybe this is just me, but it’s why I don’t like video blogs or video news. I like to skim a paragraph or two and decide if the rest is worth reading. I might have the patience for a 2-minute video. Any longer than that, and I probably won’t watch it.

After watching the video email, I thought about what it would be like to get most of my email that way. A very terrifying thought. Email would take 2-3 times as long if it were primarily video.

So I guess my position is pretty clear. Not a fan. It probably won’t come as a surprise that I haven’t embraced the video phone concept either.

Anyone else want to share an alternate view?

Tags: communication, iPhone

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 28th, 2010 at 9:21 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.