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Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

theatlantic.com

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161–170 of 203 posts

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#161

Post by rplnt »

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…

> I have absolute control of my inbox with filters, labels, and signing up for newsletters and/or updates on various subjects.

I see you are not using gmail.

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#162

Post by samastur »

Swizec wrote: post #67
verisimilidude wrote: post #44

Earlier 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…

> If any of you can figure out how to make this work, I'd definitely pay for it. I don't give out business cards. I tell people to google me and send me an email or a tweet or whatever they end up finding. This filters out everyone who doesn't have a really good reason to contact me because they just won't care enough to invest the 30s of extra time it takes to type "swizec" into google and click a link.

I think the main purpose of business cards today is to serve as a physical reminder of who you met, not to provide you contact info which can be found elsewhere.

Memory is not the best keeper of information at conferences where you might meet tens of people.

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#163

Post by wdewind »

Pxtl wrote: post #96
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.

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.

> 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.

No, if you share something to a circle someone isn't in they wont see it, so they do let you control how others see you. Not a huge G+ fan, but I was a fan of circles.

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#164

Post by viewer5 »

fred_durst wrote: post #113
tomsthumb wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I just meant it felt kind of creepy.

Why do you say that? It seems like an important thing to keep track of, for people who you don't keep in regular contact with. Prevents "Who the heck is Greg Bobberton?", if you can just look and see "Greg Bobberton: that guy from the Widgetpalooza conference, was interested in that one idea I had" (obviously with less vague specifics).

Why do you feel it would be a creepy feature?

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#165

Post by coldpie »

lukeholder wrote: post #136
jokoon wrote: post #42

and this, gentlemen, is why you should create actual protocols, not applications. applications die, protocols stay. if your software solution use the web protocol, you're already limited by it. that's why I hate 99% of the internet techs.

tell that to app.net

I got a free account and spent an evening or two trying to figure out what app.net was supposed to be, and I gave up. I get the feeling it was supposed to be something more than the ghost town Twitter-clone it appears to be, but I couldn't figure it out. Email's purpose, on the other hand, is pretty obvious.

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#166

Post by prostoalex »

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…

And yet Snapchat took over messaging by reverting back to arbitrary usernames, AOL styles.

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#167

Post by erikb »

People who think that email can die are the people who don't understand technology. Email is simply sending text from one user to another. There is nothing more simple than that. Therefore it probably won't die as long as we use text interfaces to our machines. What cute interfaces you put on top or machine learning features, that's all up to the marketing department. But all cool social networks and chat Apps can't do better than simply sending text.

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#168

Post by sp332 »

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 like the .tel domain? http://telnic.org/ You don't get to run your own server, all .tel domains are run by the same company. You just set up yourname.tel with your contact info. Example: http://mark.tel/

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#169

Post by yvsong »

ejain wrote: post #94
yvsong wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Email is not a person's unique ID, although sometimes it's used to serve that purpose. The ID layer of internet is not established yet. I'm not sure if it's possible in a decentralized system. Centralized management may be necessary.

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#170

Post by mikaraento »

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's federation is great, but it's a real pitas to scale up a single domain (long-lived connections, implementations typically assuming one node, dialbacks). The gtalk team had a really hard time with it. Http is a lot easier to scale.
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