Email will last forever

Post by ChuckMcM » Tue, Sep 02, 2014, 5:28 PM UTC

soneca wrote: post #43

ChuckMcM wrote: post #38

I find it interesting to contrast 'forever' with another technology that will last forever 'vinyl records'. I expect there will always be point to point, store and forward communication channels, but those channels have existed for millenia, from travelers who stacked rocks to tell those who came after where the trail was, to people who send compromising photos of themselves across cellular networks. So if we set asi…

About #1, I don't have the data, but I would bet that there are more people with a SMS address (aka phone number) than with an email address.

Post by dunno » Tue, Sep 02, 2014, 5:32 PM UTC

moron4hire wrote: post #26

dunno wrote: post #4

No, 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…

Post by pearknob » Tue, Sep 02, 2014, 5:34 PM UTC

daigoba66 wrote: post #25

pearknob wrote: post #3

I 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.

Post by ah- » Tue, Sep 02, 2014, 5:36 PM UTC

andyl wrote: post #55

There are tools to make use of HTTP in all sorts of ways. Curl, Wget, Restful APIs, Sinatra, Grape, etc. Fast, flexible, lightweight. Email - not so much. Want a local email server? There's Postfix - yuckkk. The overhead of spam - yuckk. The lack of tooling, the lack of configurability, the DNS complexity. The fact that it requires a SAAS to do shared inboxes. Yuck. Email could be so much better.

Post by digikata » Tue, Sep 02, 2014, 5:40 PM UTC

lucian1900 wrote: post #21

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.