what if we limit email to 140 characters and make it the ultimate decentralized push notification system?
Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
91–100 of 203 posts
Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't solve the "This order is wrong I need to send email to support@somerandomcompany.org" problem though.
I'm actually afraid that the internet is moving to this model, specifically with Facebook. How many times have you seen an ad that, instead of a URL, asks you to go to their Facebook page?
> I'm actually afraid that the internet is moving to this model, specifically with Facebook. How many times have you seen an ad that, instead of a URL, asks you to go to their Facebook page?
No more often than I used to see the same thing with an AOL Keyword instead of a URL. I don't think the internet is "moving to this model" so much as it is a model which periodically emerges when a particular portal is dominant enough with the commercially-relevant audience, and fades as the dominance of that single portal.
Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Great. The main page looks exactly like gmane, but all was explained by http://gwene.org/about.php.
Sample web interface to NNTP messages, http://read.gwene.org/group/gwene.com.nytimes.nyt.rss.books
I wonder how long they keep articles? Could be useful for podcasts.
Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
#94Email 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.
A person can have multiple identities, and not all identities are associated with specific people.
Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
#95Slack is obviously not killing emails as they are advertising through lot of PR. They have 150K active users so far. However one thing that they are correctly going after is fantastic search abilities for our own data that would include all emails, chat, attachments etc. My feeling is that eventually communication client that excels in search would indeed surface to the top. This client would then drive communication standards of the future, including emails. So in essence, problem is not integration of desperate sources of communication, but ability to search them efficiently.
Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Something I would pay for: a rolodex social network. No centralized feed. No useless info. Your profile is 2-3 sentences and your current city (with some sort of maps integration for when you travel, to see who's near you). Two buttons, one to request to view resume, and another to request to view email. That's it. With the idea being, you use the site to enable you to keep up with people. You add people you know or…
"why I know them" is a crucial feature missing from many services (along with "what name or alias I know them under"). I have hundreds of contacts from church, school, work, video games, etc.
Sounds like google's circles. The problem is that most folks treat their Gmail account as their "real" account and don't give it out willy-nilly. Also, that the circles thing is one-way - I can use circles to control how I see others, but can't use them to control how they see me.
Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
#97This 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…
> Is email our last success in popularizing an open and federated standard? Isn't the Web younger?
You are right, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email quotes 1982, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web 1989
Either way, my point still stands that besides the rapid development of the "internet", we have yet to see another standard emerge (besides OAuth and Bitcoin)
Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
#98An interesting post on this subject by Aaron Seigo: http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2014/07/one-singular-sensation-yo...
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 argume…
There are some designs for decentralization of the DNS. The decentralized nature of e-mail on the higher level still is valuable.
> 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.
I think that the biggest advantages of e-mail are its decentralization + federation based on open protocols. These make e-mail extremely useful despite all of its shortcomings. Consider for example IM services. They multiply like mushrooms these days, yet most of them completely lack federation and therefore are crippled if you look at them globally. You can't communicate with users of other services at all (unless you register there as well which defeats the purpose of decentralization). XMPP attempted to solve it, but unlike e-mail most participants on the IM scene were too selfish to fix the situation, including Google who deserted.
> 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.
I think his main point is, that in e-mail you can have real push mechanisms in theory. I.e. you send a message and the other participant receives it through the e-mail service. In social networks (even decentralized ones), the delivery of such notifications is delegated to... e-mail. Which shows their intrinsic deficiency. They aren't implementing the full scope of the communication process. I.e. if you envision a better social network, it should be decentralized but also take care of the delivery of the interactions in one coherent experience in order not to rely on other external tools for that.
E-mail isn't fully decentralized most of the time, but it still can be (you can run your own e-mail server). You can run your own Diaspora pod the same way, but like above, it would still delegate notifications to another service.
Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
#99Earlier 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…
This is totally off the cuff, but here's my first thought: To sign up for the site, you need only a username, password, and verification method (email/sms/facebook/something to authenticate you as a person, but this wouldn't necessarily be tied to the account). The usernames are unique, and your personal url is domain.com/username or something along those lines (like reddit). Then you can give your business card to e…
Doesn't the facility to redirect email from certain addresses straight to a spam box or to higher priority accounts make regular email filters more-or-less functionally equivalent?
I don't think I give my business card out to enough spammers for the need to manually opt-in everyone that wants to email me to be a less laborious task than blocking/ignoring the occasional promotional mailing.
Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
#100This 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…
I don't think that entrenched interests are not the problem here. I think it's that a small private team can always out flank a standards committee. This difference is amplified when it's not clear exactly what needs to be built and a lot of iterative design is needed.