What if someone designed a new email protocol/etc from scratch without any reference to the existing one. Could it be made better? Can you even define what better is?
There are some cases when encouraging shorter messages is very beneficial.
Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
61–70 of 203 posts
Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
#62Email is still inherently a conversation with a person or people, and that is why it has value.
Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
#63An interesting post on this subject by Aaron Seigo:
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2014/07/one-singular-sensation-yo...
Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
#64I still use pine :)
I use gmail so that I get good operation cross device but it's heavily filtered so I only see a fraction of total email on my phone, but I can search everything.
I then pop everything off using fetchmail and process all emails down to zero once or twice a day using pine (either in Terminal or irssi connectbot on my xperia).
This suits me not only from a day to day perspective but also because if gmail locks me out for some reason I can easily route around it and still have a full
backup of my email history.
Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
#65Email was one's passport and identity. Before Facebook became a true alternative for verifying one's identity on the web, the email address was how one accomplished serious things on the Internet. Want to verify a bank account? Email. Amazon? Email. Forums? Email. Even Facebook in the early days? Email. Looking at Facebook's sign up page right now, and it seems that email is still required for registering a new accou…
> Email was one's passport and identity.
Email is not an identity. Most people have multiple email addresses, and some people share some addresses.
Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
#66Email and WWW provide everything proprietary services are providing people now, but with less flash. The problem is that so many people are moving to these proprietary services that it becomes very difficult to organize and communicate people without making that move. I needed to coordinate with multiple people, and one of them emailed me that we should start a group chat on Facebook; why not just cc them?
Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
#67Wholeheartedly 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.
I don't give out business cards. I tell people to google me and send me an email or a tweet or whatever they end up finding.
This filters out everyone who doesn't have a really good reason to contact me because they just won't care enough to invest the 30s of extra time it takes to type "swizec" into google and click a link.
Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
#68Wholeheartedly 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 had high hopes that http://about.me would shape up to be this, but ... nope. http://about.me/eitally
Why isn't it? Simply too little adoption, or are they doing something wrong?
Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
#69As 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…
> Are there modern use cases for NNTP?
After the death of Google Reader, I've switched to news.gwene.org, which operates a RSS to Usenet bridge. It solves a lot of the problems that other RSS readers are still dealing with, since the Usenet people figured this stuff out back in the 80s.
Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
#70Email was one's passport and identity. Before Facebook became a true alternative for verifying one's identity on the web, the email address was how one accomplished serious things on the Internet. Want to verify a bank account? Email. Amazon? Email. Forums? Email. Even Facebook in the early days? Email. Looking at Facebook's sign up page right now, and it seems that email is still required for registering a new accou…
Last I checked Gmail allowed me to create an account without providing an email address or phone number.