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Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

theatlantic.com

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Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#101

Post by Aqueous »

zmmmmm wrote: post #86
Aqueous wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, the "nobody owns" feature of EMail is something Slack lacks and probably always will. Email is a federated, decentralized protocol of distributed mail servers that anybody can set up. Any email server can participate with any other email server. That's something that Slack will never have (it does interface with XMPP and IRC, but the service itself is centralized.) It is hard to overstate how critical…

> XMPP, IRC I actually think these guys are interesting exceptions. Yes, they are still around, but they've largely been eclipsed by proprietary solutions. Why? Why did Twitter storm to success XMPP was ostensibly the same thing but with all of these good qualities (open, federated, decentralised, etc.). Still to this day messaging is a battleground for new entrants touting completely opaque solutions. It seems like…

XMPP is one of those things that billions of people use without knowing it. Facebook Chat and GChat for a long time (and maybe still now) were actually just branded XMPP solutions - Facebook (annoyingly) shut off federation, keeping in the spirit of their walled garden approach, but GChat still interoperates with other XMPP servers if I'm not mistaken.

Edit: GTalk shut off federation for XMPP extensions like multi-user chat and Jingle (Voice-Over-IP).

As for IRC - yes it has been largely eclipsed by proprietary solutions. I chalk this up to the lack of a compelling, truly simple web front-end for it. For instance, Slack seems to imitate a lot of the feature of IRC - it would be easy enough for it to just be IRC underneath, and maybe it is. But as far as I know nobody ever wrote a true web client for IRC that was compelling enough for the mainstream.

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#102

Post by marban »

timjahn wrote: post #18
jabelk wrote: post #15

Wholeheartedly 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…

"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…

Plaxo?

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#103

Post by spullara »

jabelk wrote: post #15

Wholeheartedly 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…

That was called Plaxo.

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#104

Post by jfb »

huntaub wrote: post #30
inopinatus wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much as it pains me to mention DJB; that sounds very similar to the Internet Mail 2000 model. http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html

Good catch! We actually completely developed AirDispatch without realizing that it had many of the same tenants as IM2000. I haven't seen any IM2000 implementations, so I'd love to check it out if you know of any. Do you not like IM2000, or have other feelings towards it? I'd love to hear your feedback.

Any reticence to mention it is likely due to the fact that djb is a bit of a polarizing personality.

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#105

Post by deathanatos »

inopinatus wrote: post #19

As 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…

> And that is why I get so worried that the draft HTTP/2 editors so steadfastly refuses to do so.

Can you elaborate on what you mean here, for those of us in the dark?

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#106

Post by fred_durst »

timjahn wrote: post #18
jabelk wrote: post #15

Wholeheartedly 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…

"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 they're important". I feel like that is a pretty tough one to generalize.

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#107

Post by mahyarm »

Aqueous wrote: post #101
zmmmmm wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> XMPP, IRC I actually think these guys are interesting exceptions. Yes, they are still around, but they've largely been eclipsed by proprietary solutions. Why? Why did Twitter storm to success XMPP was ostensibly the same thing but with all of these good qualities (open, federated, decentralised, etc.). Still to this day messaging is a battleground for new entrants touting completely opaque solutions. It seems like…

XMPP is one of those things that billions of people use without knowing it. Facebook Chat and GChat for a long time (and maybe still now) were actually just branded XMPP solutions - Facebook (annoyingly) shut off federation, keeping in the spirit of their walled garden approach, but GChat still interoperates with other XMPP servers if I'm not mistaken. Edit: GTalk shut off federation for XMPP extensions like multi-us…

Internally it's not xmpp, but instead an xmpp facing compatibility layer.

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#108

Post by mgbmtl »

timjahn wrote: post #18
jabelk wrote: post #15

Wholeheartedly 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…

"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…

Probably overkill for your needs, but I use CiviCRM (https://civicrm.org) to do that for my work. It's basically a centralized web-based contact list, for which you can then link them between each other (different types of relations), add custom fields, etc. -- the program does a lot more than that (online fundraising, mass mail, event management, and other tools mostly aimed for non-profits/volunteer groups), but you can also just use it for that.

It's then possible to expose the contact data to LDAP using "ldapcivi" (https://github.com/TechToThePeople/ldapcivi), so that the contact data can be queried from any mail client (including phones).

We also integrated CiviCRM with our IRC bot, so we can query emails and other info from there. Ex: "who is John Doe" on irc will respond with the basic data (name, email, phone), as well as the relationships of that contact, ex: "John is Manager of foo at ACME".

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#109

Post by lsc »

lotharbot wrote: post #22
timjahn wrote: post #18

Earlier 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.

yeah. Linkedin needs to implement this. Just a way to add notes that are only view-able to me would solve the problem.

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#110

Post by tomsthumb »

fred_durst wrote: post #106
timjahn wrote: post #18

Earlier 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 they're important". I feel like that is a pretty tough one to generalize.

For people that you _might_ forget it should be pretty easy to summarize in a sentence or two. Two sentences should easily cover when, where, and why you met. Throw in common contacts and you're good to go. Obviously these same two sentences might not encapsulate why your wife is important to you, but, really, you aren't quite likely to forget that either.
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