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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

#151

Post by lmm »

obeattie wrote: post #143
lotharbot wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

IIRC, Facebook used to have this feature (ages ago), but it was removed. It used to ask where you knew someone from when sending a friend request, and it didn't let you send the request if you didn't know the person.

In the early days it allowed "I don't even know this person" as a reason.

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#152

Post by mverwijs »

3pt14159 wrote: post #8

Email will always be around, but I must say that "Email killers" are really going to be successful. For example, I don't remember the last time my team sent an internal email that wasn't a forward from a client. We use Slack. Exclusively. We organize projects around it, sales efforts, everything. It has the async nature of email, the separation of topics like email, and the search power of email. It also means that n…

> We use Slack.

I'm saddened and proud that every time I read that sentence, I initially think the person is using Slackware.

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#153

Post by lmm »

superuser2 wrote: post #119
bane wrote: post #111

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) emai…

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, A…

Nah. I had the same conversations on Facebook, with the same people, and initially under much the same pseudonyms, as I had on MSN 5 years previously. Excessive insistence on real names is what killed google+.

Facebook succeeded, initially, by being livejournal but not letting people customize how their profiles looked. (News Feed really wasn't big in the early days). Everyone's page looked the same, and it was a good look; you immediately knew where to see interests, where to see favourite movies and so on. It also had better-integrated photo sharing functionality than any of its rivals.

And it was a much better interface for organizing parties than anything else: a big chain of email CCs gets unwieldy fast (and is irritating to anyone who can't make the party but still sees all the messages). AIM/ICQ/MSN/* never really handled groupchat properly. Jabber screws up if you want to sign in from more than one place. IRC gets the groupchat part right, but relies on everyone leaving their computer on the whole time, or doing something even nerdier like setting up a bouncer. Skype would eventually solve the problem, but it wasn't in the picture when Facebook started out.

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#154

Post by lsc »

travem wrote: post #123
lsc wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

On the profile page of your contact there is a "★ Relationship" button. Click that and it will let you add general notes or more detailed information about how you met.

huh, cool. that's what I was asking for.

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#155

Post by lmm »

daigoba66 wrote: post #112
nchuhoai wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

SOAP? It was almost a good idea.

It was a great idea, badly implemented. I feel confident that we'll rediscover SOAP, or something like it - it's still pretty much the best option for RPC in typed languages, which are coming back into fashion. (Maybe Thrift is better, but it's morally the same thing IMO).

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#156

Post by lsc »

lotharbot wrote: post #127
travem wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the profile page of your contact there is a "★ Relationship" button. Click that and it will let you add general notes or more detailed information about how you met.

who is that information viewable by? I don't want to put in "obnoxious guy from conference" and then have that person be able to read it.

Yeah, something that stores the data in a system I control and then pastes it on to the page with a greasemonkey script would be optimal.

But, then that would be work.

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#157

Post by lmm »

coldcode wrote: post #9

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 certainly things I would fix. Require all servers to be 8-bit clean, and default text to UTF-8. Sort out the rendering of HTML email, either using something that's more amenable to embedding in a fixed screen frame, or some more extensible standard to allow different types of document to be attached with dispositional settings. (In fact this is something I'd want to solve in general - embedding objects in webpages has long been a mess, to the point where we've resorted to specific and tags rather than trying to solve "embed another file in this web page" in a general way).

As another poster said, crypto everywhere and a permission system, from DNSSEC on down. Every assertion would carry a cryptographic chain of its authority.

Some kind of multi-user solution would be great. Mailing lists are a hack. To some extent NNTP filled this role though - maybe it's just a case of using the right protocol for the right job.

So yeah, it could definitely be made better - very few protocols are perfect. But it's done pretty well considering.

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#158

Post by leni536 »

tomphoolery wrote: post #139

I somewhat disagree with the background data this article cites as reasons for why everyone wants email dead. I do not believe people like Slack, Asana, et. al. are trying to kill email, rather, I believe they are trying to offer services that help to reduce email's dominance over communications. One thing that email does not provide for anyone is choice. The barrier to entry is running your own IMAP, SMTP, and possi…

>You mail letters, not one-line replies.

What stops you to send a one-line reply in email?

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#159

Post by blueskin_ »

What I find interesting about people who say email is bad is they they almost all have some vested interest in another communication method, especially something proprietary...

Email will outlive everyone commenting here because it works. I run my own server so I know the NSA don't have direct access to content (although I always take note of any inbound messages that are flagged as not having used TLS, or where the other address is gmail etc.), I can make disposable addresses, addresses specific to websites (to identify sites that sell/leak your address), I can run my own spamfiltering that doesn't invade my privacy, I can DKIM sign my messages and have a provable way that only I sent the message, I can use PGP for any private information, I have a set of filters to classify email so I don't even need to spend that much time dealing with it, and I can access it from anywhere I can get an SSH client. No service does that.

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#160

Post by gjvc »

I'll rise to the bait.

http://incubator.apache.org/wave/ (first from Google, now Apache) was/is a brave try. The main problem with email is the lack of consistent formatting rules which means that it's difficult to keep track of structure.

But hey, it's a massive success. Worse sometimes really is better.

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