I tend to disagree. To me the WWW is the best thing on the internet.
But I do use the heck out of email ever since I quit all social networks a couple of years ago.
Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
41–50 of 203 posts
Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
#42and this, gentlemen, is why you should create actual protocols, not applications.
applications die, protocols stay.
if your software solution use the web protocol, you're already limited by it. that's why I hate 99% of the internet techs.
Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
#43Want to verify a bank account? Email. Amazon? Email. Forums? Email. Even Facebook in the early days? Email.
This is a big part of why email continues to thrive. So many services have email baked in (e.g. a new WordPress install sends you an email). There are some services that let you choose between email and SMS, like plane reservations and banking alerts, but 95% of the time, any notification will come through email.
Given that, there is no way you could eliminate email without cutting off all those services in the process. Any new protocol to replace email would have to be a drop-in replacement for anything that currently sends out email or at least coexist peacefully alongside it.
You would think that if anyone could accomplish that it would be Facebook or Twitter, but I haven't seen any integration like that so far (e.g. get your plane reservation update or Amazon shipping confirmation by Twitter DM or Facebook message).
Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
#44Wholeheartedly agree with the article. I have absolute control of my inbox with filters, labels, and signing up for newsletters and/or updates on various subjects. There is no way a centralized end-to-end service is going to eclipse email for me, unless they radically change their business models. The value proposition is just really bad in all the services I've seen so far. "Oh, you want me to sign up for your servi…
I recently gave serious thought to building something similar to a rolodex social network, but eventually poked too many holes in it to follow through.
I'd just come back from a conference at which I'd been asked for business cards by lots of people, maybe a hundred. Of all those people, I only really cared to hear back from a few. Though it's nice to have my name out there and be cordial in the industry, I wanted to place some kind of filter on all the vendor spam that inevitably followed. If...I could easily provide "redacted" or "enriched" contact info, maybe via QR on a smartphone screen, for instance, it would be possible to meter who gets which contact info without hurting any future networking opportunities.
If any of you can figure out how to make this work, I'd definitely pay for it.
Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
#45Wholeheartedly agree with the article. I have absolute control of my inbox with filters, labels, and signing up for newsletters and/or updates on various subjects. There is no way a centralized end-to-end service is going to eclipse email for me, unless they radically change their business models. The value proposition is just really bad in all the services I've seen so far. "Oh, you want me to sign up for your servi…
I recently gave serious thought to building something similar to a rolodex social network, but eventually poked too many holes in it to follow through. I'd just come back from a conference at which I'd been asked for business cards by lots of people, maybe a hundred. Of all those people, I only really cared to hear back from a few. Though it's nice to have my name out there and be cordial in the industry, I wanted to…
> If any of you can figure out how to make this work, I'd definitely pay for it.
You have two versions of your business card. One goes to anyone and has a junk email. The other goes to wanted contacts, and has an email that you pay attention to.
Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
#46Facebook Messenger will eclipse email. Social network is the perfect spam filter.
Like AIM, Trillian, IRC did?
Wrong use case...
Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
#47As this article alludes to: the heart of email's longevity, the thing that prevents it being closed by a single entity, is being a classical IETF protocol: federated, decentralized, open and interoperable. The first two of those properties arise from being based on the DNS for SMTP endpoint discovery. This is why every protocol needs to specify that it uses the DNS, and how. And that is why I get so worried that the…
It would be useful to draw a dependency graph of IETF and W3C protocols that characterizes each one on their degree of divergence from classical IETF values. Identify the point(s) in time where history took a wrong turn, revert to that point, fork and start over with new protocols. It can't be any less disruptive than new protocols which have a non-classical values.
Are there modern use cases for NNTP? Could UUCP be used for sneakernet or bluetooth intermittent mesh applications? What's the verdict on WebDAV, CalDAV and CardDAV as neutral protocols for sharing data, contacts & calendar?
Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recently gave serious thought to building something similar to a rolodex social network, but eventually poked too many holes in it to follow through. I'd just come back from a conference at which I'd been asked for business cards by lots of people, maybe a hundred. Of all those people, I only really cared to hear back from a few. Though it's nice to have my name out there and be cordial in the industry, I wanted to…
> If any of you can figure out how to make this work, I'd definitely pay for it. You have two versions of your business card. One goes to anyone and has a junk email. The other goes to wanted contacts, and has an email that you pay attention to.
Exactly. For most people, that's probably enough. I couldn't see the business case for creating a whole social network out of the concept.
For myself though, I could easily see creating 9 or 10 cards for different situations. It'd be nice to have an easy way to manage all that.
Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
#49It would probably only take one innovation in email, something that Gmail could probably pull off, to make email lovable again.
I really think that if Google could help alleviate people's concerns with email (volume, spam etc), people would be quite happy with email again :)
Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
#50Wholeheartedly agree with the article. I have absolute control of my inbox with filters, labels, and signing up for newsletters and/or updates on various subjects. There is no way a centralized end-to-end service is going to eclipse email for me, unless they radically change their business models. The value proposition is just really bad in all the services I've seen so far. "Oh, you want me to sign up for your servi…
Isn't this basically the same as your email contacts list with a free text field?