It is, however, a horrifically bad protocol. We don't need a new app, but a better protocol for unified mail, IM and audio/video. XMPP is close, but flawed.
Email will last forever
21–30 of 169 posts
Re: Email will last forever
#22Depends on what you mean by "forever." If you mean, say, 30-50 years, even maybe 1000, sure, i'll give you that, but i'm still skeptical, but to suggest that there won't be a better communication tool that comes along to replace the written word from one node to one other, i'd say you're deluded. There is lots of room for improvement.
Re: Email will last forever
#23Well for me, Email is already dead. Of course, dead software still exists, for information can not be destroyed. But, there will be more surveillance. There will be more counter-surveillance tools becoming popular. But Email will not stay on that list. Over the long run, the electronic mail will fall back behind inherently encrypted solutions. At least I hope that.
Re: Email will last forever
#24No one mentions portability, but I believe it is a wonderful property of email - I have more than 15 years of email, moved across various servers and clients on various operating systems and it is still available and functional. What other personal communication channel is that resilient to technological change ?
Tongue in cheeck: paper is.
Re: Email will last forever
#25I think that a lot of "startups" are using the fantasy of an email-less world as a marketing tactic. I agree, I don't think email is going to disappear. Whether that is a good thing or bad, it's irrelevant
I'm still hoping to see a resurgence in software designed around federated protocols and architectures.
Basically the opposite of things like Google Hangouts, iMessage, Skype, Dropbox, iCloud/Google Docs, and many others.
Re: Email will last forever
#26No, it won't. I distinctly remember being told by many people that email would never replace letter mail because email was too impersonal.
"Impersonal" was only ever a label applied to email by people who didn't yet have access to the Internet, jealous they were being excluded. It's the same people who decried smartphones.
In all areas that matter, email is superior to paper letters. And in all areas that matter, no one has proposed an alternative to email that is superior in a way that cannot be applied to email.
In other words, whatever is wrong about email, can be fixed from within the system. Paper letters had to become email to fix what was wrong with paper letters.
Re: Email will last forever
#27> "People spend on average 2.5 hours per day on their emails" Source? That seems really, really high to me for an average .
That sounds about right to me if you include both personal and work email time. You might be surprised at the number of people in large organizations that spend seven hours a day actively reading and writing email.
Re: Email will last forever
#28No one mentions portability, but I believe it is a wonderful property of email - I have more than 15 years of email, moved across various servers and clients on various operating systems and it is still available and functional. What other personal communication channel is that resilient to technological change ?
Thanks, Jon Postel, http://www.internetsociety.org/what-we-do/grants-and-awards/...
Re: Email will last forever
#29No, it won't. I distinctly remember being told by many people that email would never replace letter mail because email was too impersonal.
"Impersonal" was only ever a label applied to email by people who didn't yet have access to the Internet, jealous they were being excluded. It's the same people who decried smartphones. In all areas that matter, email is superior to paper letters. And in all areas that matter, no one has proposed an alternative to email that is superior in a way that cannot be applied to email. In other words, whatever is wrong about…
> "Impersonal" was only ever a label applied to email by people who didn't yet have access to the Internet, jealous they were being excluded.
This is factually incorrect. Everone I've ever heard use the term to describe email had internet access and was a regular email user at the time they used the term. I'm sure some people who didn't have email have used the term, and I'm sure some of those people had the motivation you describe, but it is simply not true that it was "only ever" used by people without access to the internet (or, more relevantly, email -- whether on the internet or otherwise, as electronic mail existed on networks besides the internet.)
> In all areas that matter, email is superior to paper letters.
"areas that matter" is a subjective category (and, further, superiority in each of those areas is, generally, subjective as well), it may well be superior to you in each of the areas that matter to you, but those subjective judgements may not hold more generally.
Re: Email will last forever
#30The single most important issue with email: Team Inboxes. As soon as more than one person works with an inbox, it sucks big time. But I agree - email will last forever, nearly none of the products you mentioned work without an email notification feature.
A team inbox is almost always better handled by a ticketing system or a mailing list or both.
or Front :)