Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

I'm pretty firm in my belief that one of the great marketing moves of the 21st century is convincing people that email is not a social network. It's almost on par with making people believe that diamonds are romantic and a necessary part of the marriage ritual.

I think this has been helped by the general lack of innovation in the email space. From pretty basic mail, we ended up with a few (very surprisingly few) email clients and very little advancement on the original theme outside of html formatting and huge inboxes.

Lots of people dump on Microsoft, but one of the huge upsides of exchange is the tight integration of mail and calendar. From a conversation you can immediately schedule actions. Invites are even sent out over SMTP if I'm not mistaken. Getting a calendar to integrate well with gmail was one of the major accomplishments of web-based email, yet it seems like repeating this anywhere else is an accomplishment comparable to discovering cold fusion.

There's also been pitifully little work done in improving the experience of managing email and calendar servers. Managing spam is still a tremendous problem and all this adds up to most places, if they aren't using Exchange, just buying corporate Outlook.com or gmail accounts for their employees.

The problem of course is that for any serious advancement to really work, everybody (both client and server) have to move to support the advancement.

But one lesson to be learned from Facebook and G+ is that email can be replaced by an easier to use and friendlier system. There's a possibility of disruption, but it's obviously not in anybody's particular interest to keep reinventing email+otherstuff in this kind of highly centralized way. If Facebook goes down, there goes a huge chunk of the global communication system. At least with email I can be pretty sure my message is going to arrive at the destination at some point.

Another lesson to be learned is that social networks like Facebook are actually just a combination and integration of two (or three) common things that used to be all over the web: a personal website and email. You get a profile (which does a good enough approximation of the personal homepages of the web 1.0 days but actually a bit more like ) and people can message you (and more recently IM you). Basically a global presence you don't have to put much effort into to manage and a way to contact you. More importantly Facebook offers you various levels of control over who can see your presence and who can message you. Spam is almost unknown in Facebook's version of email.

So when I see distributed social network efforts like Diaspora, and all this talk of authentication and protocols and whatnot I wonder why we're not really using and extending the distributed infrastructure we already have. Even if we improve it in some way that makes it no longer work with the old email network, it won't be the first time a better internet service replaced a previous one (WWW replaced gopher for example) -- there's no reason two competing distributed messaging services can't run in parallel.

I just meant it felt kind of creepy.

You can use Facebook to accomplish everything you can do with your social network. Make your profile 2-3 sentences and your current city, allow people to request to see email, and just ignore the feed.

The advantage of course is that there's about a billion people already on it.

What you need is an "premium" email at a "premium e-mail provider". :)

You signed up as Joe Doe and plug your basic info: website url, physical address, your real email address, phone number cell phone, etc. All this can be in multitude quantity, like your email: office job 1, office job 2, personal. All this info is confidential and only seen to you.

Then your conference comes in. You click "create addresses" and system is randomly generating your email addresses, like this:

joe-doe-349522@email.com

joe-doe-153212@email.com

joe-doe-145621@email.com

joe-doe-675427@email.com

Then for each email you can setup few options, like:

- forward this email to office job 1

- forward this email to office job 2

- forward this email to my personal email

- if someone emails me at this email, send them autoreply with short profile: my homepage url, my pshysical address, my office phone, but no cell phone.

- if someone emails me at this email, send them autoreply with my personal cellphone.

When forwarding your email you can have optional header, such as extra info you added initially: "this is my Word Expo 2014". Then when 2016 comes in and you receive an email, header tells you the origin of it.

You can setup any email to hold on mail and not forward it at all and just notify you once a week/month/once there is X emails awaiting.

At any point you can dispose an email or simply set it to auto-expire. Or change its settings for that matter.

You have two options when it comes to your presentatione. You can go high tech and print (or request print) of business cards with QR code where each code is your CRF card with different email of course. In this scenario you could have different color of qr code representing different email setup and just memorize: green qr code - potential investors, yellow qr code - potential employees, blue qr code - cute blonde that i think likes me!

Or even simplier solution: order yourself a few thousand business cards with your email address like this: "joe-doe_______@email.com" and then just write down the email number after the pre-printed part of your email address that will match particular premium email #. And if someone asks about it, just tell them a perfect excuse: "oh yeah i get so much spam that once a year i have to create a new email for myself".

Someone building such a system could call it similar to gmail so your emails look normal, like maybe pmail.com (for "premium" mail) or something like it.

I think the problem is that this is very niche market. I am sure for a right solution you would pay even $99 per year, but again it would be hard to market and even harder to make some money long-term off of it :)

I'm convinced that Facebook took over messaging because it has one killer feature the 90s didn't: real names.

Contact points on Facebook are discoverable by real name based on the social graph, which is kind of a first in the history of communication. If someone mentions a John Doe in conversation, I can get in contact with the correct John Doe with a very high probability of success and no effort.

The PSTN, email, AIM, ICQ, MSN, etc. didn't offer that. They could have, but their communities developed with different norms. Facebook managed to get people to use their actual identities. That's a remarkable feat - not even Google could replicate it. But it's what made Facebook so useful and so addictive - it's about the actual lives of people I actually know.

Facebook does contain an analogue of "Web 1.0" personal webpages, but the action on Facebook is centered on the News Feed, which was sort of a new class of thing. Few people actually have profile information filled out; going to someone's Facebook page is just a way of filtering the News Feed to only content related to that person.

The real "Web 1.0" equivalent to Facebook would have been an RSS reader for all your friends' blogs. But for people to be comfortable blogging, they had to be able to (feel like they were) in control of their audience. Though Blogger, Wordpress, etc. supported user authentication, it would have been incredibly onerous compared to centralized identity. Which is more or less what Facebook became.

A truly open, distributed Facebook based on the "Web 1.0" would probably have looked something like an RSS reader that could authenticate to each friend's blog with OpenID. But it still would have lacked the ability to discover and search for people by real name that makes Facebook so useful.