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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

#171

Post by davmre »

joering2 wrote: post #117
verisimilidude wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. For most people, that's probably enough. I couldn't see the business case for creating a whole social network out of the concept. For myself though, I could easily see creating 9 or 10 cards for different situations. It'd be nice to have an easy way to manage all that.

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 sy…

You can actually do this with gmail itself: johndoe+x@gmail.com is a valid alias for johndoe@gmail.com, for any value of x. So you can make up whatever set of custom addresses you want; they all go to the same account, and filtering/forwarding/etc. can be done with standard gmail filters (not sure about autoresponses; you'd probably need a third-party client for that).

Of course this plus-sign behavior is a pretty well-known fact about Gmail, so it'll be obvious that you're bucketing your email in this way. Anyone can easily read off the 'base' address johndoe@gmail.com, so you'd need to set it up so that mail to this address is heavily restricted and anyone wanting to actually reach you would have to use johndoe+secret@gmail.com or whatever. But I think this would basically also be true of any custom service you could invent having similar functionality.

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#172

Post by PeterWhittaker »

joering2 wrote: post #117
verisimilidude wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. For most people, that's probably enough. I couldn't see the business case for creating a whole social network out of the concept. For myself though, I could easily see creating 9 or 10 cards for different situations. It'd be nice to have an easy way to manage all that.

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 sy…

But gmail basically does this now with the +: joe-doe+1456212@gmail.com, joe-doe+_____@gmail.com, etc.

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#173

Post by PeterWhittaker »

augustocallejas wrote: post #134
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…

Humin sounds like what you're looking for: https://www.humin.com/#/product

Humin looks interesting but logging in with facebook is a deal-breaker for me. Logging in with google would be slightly better, since all of my contacts are there already and if Humin doesn't integrate with my current contacts I'm not sure what value it has.

Contacts+ uses my google and facebook and twitter credentials to link to those services, not to verify who I am - and if I don't want to link to FB or twitter, I don't have to; I'm definitely uncomfortable with being forced to use a particular identity provider.

I wonder if Humin has really thought through their identity and credential management requirements. A great many sites these days allow one to create an account simply by logging in "on the fly" using an existing email address and a password you enter then and there. One email validation email and you're good to go.

Why would Humin need more than that?

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#174

Post by AnonJ »

I can never imagine how would a university/its various student organizations get their messages through to students, without email. I went on a full-year exchange to Chile, where the email service simply is useless and everybody(including university officials) seems to rely on Facebook, which to me was simply crazy. Why would something like FB be used for any serious business? How would they suppose that everybody has a FB account and likes to use it? That was a truly horrible experience, especially for a Social Network avoider like me.

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#175

Post by minikites »

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…

Didn't tent.io try this?

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#176

Post by AndrewKemendo »

I think the main thing keeping email as the baseline for communication on the internet is it's cost. There has been no other service that can provide such a varied yet simple medium of communication - text, images, video attachments with history and an audit-able trail - for free.

The closest that anyone has come have been the big social providers with messaging applications which mimic email in many respects. Even then, they are copying the email model with a branded version - not replacing it.

It will take an entirely new and different protocol that simplifies communication with the same or better capability scope to displace email.

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#177

Post by [deleted] »

prostoalex wrote: post #166
superuser2 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#178

Post by chippy »

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…

Twitter originally had a chat interface. It's where most people I knew, used to use it - via pidgin. I think it was an AIM bot.

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#180

Post by superuser2 »

prostoalex wrote: post #166
superuser2 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Snapchat bootstraps its social graph on top of the already-existing social graph of "people who have each other's cell phone numbers." Actually learning and typing in people's Snapchat usernames is possible but not common.

Exchanging phone numbers is already integrated into the social fabric of our society as a step in escalating a friendship or asking for / receiving the opportunity to date someone. It's a somewhat intimate act, and appropriate for a communication mechanism that's basically only used between people who are already friends.

Snapchat doesn't have the ability to discover acquaintances / friends-of-friends nearly as easily as Facebook does.

I also wouldn't say it "took over messaging." People don't really have actual conversations on Snapchat, they send photos of themselves making weird faces or Twitter-style status updates. New class of thing.

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