Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

I could imagine setting up the following cards right away. And by "card", I'm not specifically referring to a piece of paper, but perhaps some kind of contact-info-related digital object.

* BFFs

* Recent acquaintances

* Close family (reasonable people)

* Extended family (think annoying newsletter emails)

* Co-workers (cell number included)

* Clients (cell number definitely not included)

* Spammy business contacts (vendors)

* Travel (something I could hand out with temp hotel and phone info, etc.)

* Japanese (my wife is from Japan, we have lots of friends here and visit there often)

I could also imagine handing out specific cards at various social functions. For example, at a writing club I used to attend, I'd want to provide a link to my portfolio online. I'd never ever want anyone else to read that embarrassing stuff though. In another case, I used to attend a board game club, and it would've been nice to hand out cards with links to my profile on boardgamegeek, meet-up profile, etc.

It seems like this would work best if the exchange format was simply vCard or some other open format. You get to control who gets what at the point of exchange, and they can consume it into whatever system they like. There's no after-the-fact futzing with tags or permissions or contact management; it's just a system to control how you present yourself. The whole idea is probably DOA if you can't interface with the rest of the world's contact software. Maybe you allow connections if both people in the exchange are users of your service, but you wouldn't want to take it for granted.

As an aside, this got really interesting when we considered the "hot girl in a bar" situation. Let's say she gets asked for contact details many times, it's too loud to hear names or whatever, so she might need to snap a picture of the guy at any point of exchange, then review and modify permissions later. But that seems kinda fussy as a system.

Maybe add a little bit of useful cryptography even. Spam is already fixed by Google, and volume? How could Google fix that?

This article is good but it makes some comments that don't seem true to me.

> It's a globally addressable system that does not require any centralized system, which means it works everywhere and for everyone no matter what choice in service provider the individual user (or their organization) makes.

Isn't it the case that nearly all email is routed using DNS? Certainly all of mine is. While there are certainly arguments against centralized addressing systems, the advantage that email has isn't that its addressing system is uncentralized: it's that its addressing system is more libre than proprietary systems.

>These "open social networks" don't pass messages to the end user. They pass messages to servers which the user then consults.

How is this different from email? Most people don't have email addresses at a domain assigned to their normal computer; the vast majority of email is accessed over some internet protocol from a remote server, whether its IMAP, POP3, or HTTP. I've never used Diaspora, so maybe I just don't understand what functionality its missing.

This brings up a point I think about a lot:

Is email our last success in popularizing an open and federated standard?

Maybe you can count OAuth, but IMO i have low confidence that we'll in the near future be able to collaborate on an open protocol so that many benefits of email such as control without vendor lock-in can be enjoyed.

We have too many entrenched interests by the main players. I have been working briefly on improving the exchange of trust/reputation data online, but it seemd for us that there was no alternative to a proprietary system if you wish to see widespread adoption.

EDIT: I guess Bitcoin has good potential.

I disagree. A modern device is almost entirely composed of files downloaded from the internet. The binary for your web browser is just a local cache of an entity that exists in the cloud. You need a local cache because bandwidth and latency are too high to retrieve a new copy every single time you run the program unless you need an update. It seems a pity to not use storage to cache when it is available. Especially considering that to most people bandwidth is much more expensive than storage.