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.
I have my own opinions on the subject but curious what you see as XMPPs failings?
Email will last forever
111–120 of 169 posts
Re: Email will last forever
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vinyl was physical. As were cassettes, envelopes, postcards etc. Email has one thing going for it that other platforms similarly didn't offer : It's the first personalised, and therefore recognisable, addressing system for an intangible communications platform that's still largely open (Ex: Unlike twitter et al. which has severely limited means of communication and, more importantly, what I can communicate). I submit…
It would be interesting to see an alternative to Twitter that is as open as email is. eg: A microblogging system that is built on open standards in a distributed and federated way. Where no-one owns the platform and protocols. In the beginning of the internet a bunch of open system emerged: Email, IRC, DNS, ... Nowadays it's mostly businesses that launch proprietary solutions to make $$$. What has changed since those…
It would be interesting to see an alternative to Twitter that is as open as email is. eg: A microblogging system that is built on open standards in a distributed and federated way. Where no-one owns the platform and protocols.
There has been for years, it's called StatusNet (now GNU Social, apparently) and it's based on the open OStatus protocol. I had my own server federating with the reference instance (Laconi.ca), on which I followed a few users, like Tim Berners-Lee (who mostly cross-posted from Twitter).
Re: Email will last forever
#113I 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…
My opinionated 2¢ on why e-mails will live while many an "e-mail killer" dies mourned by no one. E-mail is just better way of doing snail-mail, a technology that we had since we first invented writing. One could say that our whole civilization is built on such communication, as one could not conduct business, make a war or govern a country without mail. E-mails is just the same, only faster, and it shares all the ben…
There's also the fact that the email format (something that is specifically not instant or near-instant, is primarily text, and works well in limited bandwidth situations) is well suited to interplanetary messages. I hope we will have that "problem" soon!
Re: Email will last forever
#114No 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 ?
True. But on the other hand, its still (against all reason) too hard to actually do anything with such massive archives unless you really prepare for it .. like you, I have more than 15 years of email collected over the decades, but actually being able to do something productive with it depends on just how much time I want to spend setting up a system that can handle the mbox files of the 80's, the Eudora archives of…
Since I always use IMAP, the local archive format is irrelevant to me - my mail entirely lives on an IMAP server.
I did have to migrate twice: once when switching from Eudora using POP3 to using IMAP, I moved the mail from the local Eudora archive to the IMAP server. Then other times when switching servers - either by moving the maildir or using IMAP synchronization.
I subscribe to the old archiving adage: if it is not spinning, it is dead !
Re: Email will last forever
#115The reason email will last forever is that nobody owns it. If Twitter goes bust then you lose all of your tweets. If Facebook goes bust then all of your status updates go out of the window. But email is an open, free protocol that anyone can implement and is deliberately designed to be decentralised. And so the ecosystem will last as long as a few people find it useful.
Facebook is more likely to stay than email IMO.
Re: Email will last forever
#116Depends 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.
30-50 years is surely "forever" even in snail mail terms. 1000 years? Wow now we're talking about an era-defining technology for civilization itself! I'm going to go with your lower bound: if email lasts largely unchanged for 30 years, then it will have been the most important application of the internet era.
Re: Email will last forever
#117I 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…
My opinionated 2¢ on why e-mails will live while many an "e-mail killer" dies mourned by no one. E-mail is just better way of doing snail-mail, a technology that we had since we first invented writing. One could say that our whole civilization is built on such communication, as one could not conduct business, make a war or govern a country without mail. E-mails is just the same, only faster, and it shares all the ben…
"Want to create an 'e-mail killer'? Apply some humility. Accept that you will not be The One Gateway to Human Communication" - Saving this quote.
Re: Email will last forever
#118I 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…
My opinionated 2¢ on why e-mails will live while many an "e-mail killer" dies mourned by no one. E-mail is just better way of doing snail-mail, a technology that we had since we first invented writing. One could say that our whole civilization is built on such communication, as one could not conduct business, make a war or govern a country without mail. E-mails is just the same, only faster, and it shares all the ben…
I agree with your reasons, but it's interesting to consider that realtime IM is one area that, while there exists a standard, simple, and scalable protocol that's been around for a long time - IRC - it's nowhere near as popular as the proprietary alternatives that followed. IRC usage is declining, and of the people I know, the majority have never heard of it. Yet almost everyone knows about email, AIM, MSN Messenger, and now Skype. What lead to this huge difference? Is it just the triumph of marketing client software, or is there something else?
Re: Email will last forever
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
My opinionated 2¢ on why e-mails will live while many an "e-mail killer" dies mourned by no one. E-mail is just better way of doing snail-mail, a technology that we had since we first invented writing. One could say that our whole civilization is built on such communication, as one could not conduct business, make a war or govern a country without mail. E-mails is just the same, only faster, and it shares all the ben…
I like to say "Email: it's good enough." Spam is horrible, but filtering seems to work well enough these days. (Which makes me wonder why people are still spamming, but that's a separate post about game theory.)
Filtering doesn't work well enough at all. The fact that you can't be sure if your email was received is a problem. Many companies have over-aggressive spam filters and the recipients sometimes never even see the emails in their spam box - they're either bounced or black-holed. Often this is done by blacklisting IP addresses. When that IP happens to be the mail server of a service provider with many customers, when one of them sends spam, all of them get their emails blocked.
Unreliable delivery is perhaps on of the biggest problems with email. Largely due to faulty spam filtering.
Re: Email will last forever
#120I 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…
My opinionated 2¢ on why e-mails will live while many an "e-mail killer" dies mourned by no one. E-mail is just better way of doing snail-mail, a technology that we had since we first invented writing. One could say that our whole civilization is built on such communication, as one could not conduct business, make a war or govern a country without mail. E-mails is just the same, only faster, and it shares all the ben…
There are a lot of people for whom I have no email address, but whom I can reach at a moment's notice on Facebook. The problem with email is there is no directory, whereas on Facebook it's easy to search for "Friends of Joe named July" or what have you and get in touch with them.