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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

#181

Post by epochwolf »

dredmorbius wrote: post #124
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…

There's nothing that prevents a non-Microsoft calendaring system from supplanting it, other than on agreeing on the protocol. Email has MIME, there are calendar information formats (ical, IIRC), and various MIME handlers. The primary block was that Microsoft owned the corporate desktop, and competitors, until Google came along, couldn't agree on interoperable standards. Facebook and Google win by being Web based and…

> There's nothing that prevents a non-Microsoft calendaring system from supplanting it, other than on agreeing on the protocol.

Google and Apple both have integrated calendar and email systems. They just use separate apps instead of having everything in one silo.

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#182

Post by silverlake »

spullara wrote: post #103
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.

It's still around and does exactly what this thread is asking for. http://plaxo.com

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#183

Post by zokier »

lmm wrote: post #157
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 w…

> 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

Like and tags in HTML?

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#184

Post by iminaii »

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…

How much would you pay? I might build that.

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#185

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#186

Post by jarek »

sp332 wrote: post #168
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/

http://mark.tel (and about.me mentioned in another comment) is a prime example of a problem with using given names/last names to form URLs to share contact information. Say you get http://smith.tel - this is great for you but bad for every other Smith out there. http://mark.smith.tel doesn't solve it either.

OTOH using some sort of central-issued IDs (NI, kennitala, PESEL, SSN, INSEE, passport number) like http://87120402424.pl.tel feels a bit dystopian...

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#188

Post by msh »

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.

I was not that big fan of circles, made sharing with the wrong people easy.

I like that my personal life (facebook) and professional (linkedin) is two different networks. Its hard to accidentally share the the bad joke with my professional network.

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#189

Post by jeffreyrogers »

rmrfrmrf wrote: post #116
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #36

I don't understand the point about college students viewing email as stale. I'm in college and email is used more than ever. I used to get tens of emails a day from various student groups (now they get sent to spam), and it is pretty much the easiest/fastest way for groups to communicate with each other. Sure, email isn't "sexy" anymore, but that doesn't mean people of my generation don't appreciate it.

From the spammer's perspective, e-mail is stale because you're sending everything to the spam folder rather than clicking, sharing, and buying.

Other people use it though and do click through. I just make a conscious effort to remove clutter from my life.

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#190

Post by keithpeter »

dools wrote: post #64

I still use pine :) I use gmail so that I get good operation cross device but it's heavily filtered so I only see a fraction of total email on my phone, but I can search everything. I then pop everything off using fetchmail and process all emails down to zero once or twice a day using pine (either in Terminal or irssi connectbot on my xperia). This suits me not only from a day to day perspective but also because if g…

Thanks very much for this post. I'm doing a full pop3 download of around 3 years of mostly email newsletters from my gmail account now.

In order to enable pop3 though, I had to change a default gmail security setting. Have you had any issues at all since leaving pop enabled?

Using Kmail, I'm having to fetch each month's worth of email at a time. Can't find a setting anywhere so assume that is a Google thing.

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