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E-mail is the Universal Platform

blog.contactually.com

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Re: E-mail is the Universal Platform

#11

Post by skevvis »

rvkennedy wrote: post #9

Sooner or later, email will either die or get better. The problem with email for most of its life was that there was little competition. Certainly SMTP has never had a serious rival. IMAP came to challenge POP, and won: this made email better. And Exchange has certainly set a standard that IMAP and webmail providers have had to meet. But it's not much compared to the seething shark tank that the web has been for the…

Completely agree with you that email will either die or get better. The timeline is the question. We haven't seen any strong competitors to the current incarnation of "e-mail" come and really threaten the core architecture. E-mail is too open, too standardized, too widely implemented to be quickly overtaken by any other solution.

With Contactually, we started with that theory - e-mail is still, and will be for the foreseeable future, the primary mode of communication. We're not focusing on making the user send and receive more emails - but we push the realization that e-mail is already where you're doing most of your communication. Why shouldn't you have a tool that leverages that?

Re: E-mail is the Universal Platform

#12

Post by skevvis »

blueplastic wrote: post #3

So, why would I trust you with 5 years of all my sent and received emails? Should I take your word for it that you'll just save the email addresses and the sent/received timestamp for each?

@blueplastic - we do regular security audits and will soon engage with a firm to provide that guarantee as well. In the interim, what would you like to see to alleviate that?

Re: E-mail is the Universal Platform

#13

Post by blueplastic »

skevvis wrote: post #11
rvkennedy wrote: post #9

Sooner or later, email will either die or get better. The problem with email for most of its life was that there was little competition. Certainly SMTP has never had a serious rival. IMAP came to challenge POP, and won: this made email better. And Exchange has certainly set a standard that IMAP and webmail providers have had to meet. But it's not much compared to the seething shark tank that the web has been for the…

Completely agree with you that email will either die or get better. The timeline is the question. We haven't seen any strong competitors to the current incarnation of "e-mail" come and really threaten the core architecture. E-mail is too open, too standardized, too widely implemented to be quickly overtaken by any other solution. With Contactually, we started with that theory - e-mail is still, and will be for the fo…

Did you totally miss Facebook's existence? Teenagers these days don't even use email. Facebook's sucking in the next generation's messages. Email's too slow and asynchronous they cry. Douglas Rushkoff would bet to differ, but anyway. Facebook's unified messaging was kind of interesting, but I might as well be CCing all my email to Kim Jong-un.

Re: E-mail is the Universal Platform

#14

Post by skevvis »

blueplastic wrote: post #13
skevvis wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree with you that email will either die or get better. The timeline is the question. We haven't seen any strong competitors to the current incarnation of "e-mail" come and really threaten the core architecture. E-mail is too open, too standardized, too widely implemented to be quickly overtaken by any other solution. With Contactually, we started with that theory - e-mail is still, and will be for the fo…

Did you totally miss Facebook's existence? Teenagers these days don't even use email. Facebook's sucking in the next generation's messages. Email's too slow and asynchronous they cry. Douglas Rushkoff would bet to differ, but anyway. Facebook's unified messaging was kind of interesting, but I might as well be CCing all my email to Kim Jong-un.

Definitely - when it comes to social communication, there's Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc. And that's bleeding across into professional communications as well, with companies regularly monitoring social networks and engaging with customers on there. But e-mail still remains, for professional communication, the dominant platform.

Re: E-mail is the Universal Platform

#15

Post by blueplastic »

skevvis wrote: post #12
blueplastic wrote: post #3

So, why would I trust you with 5 years of all my sent and received emails? Should I take your word for it that you'll just save the email addresses and the sent/received timestamp for each?

@blueplastic - we do regular security audits and will soon engage with a firm to provide that guarantee as well. In the interim, what would you like to see to alleviate that?

I do appreciate the reply. The only way I'd feel safe is if you never got or saw my emails. Instead of me sending 5 years of my emails to you, I'd rather you send me 2,000 lines of code to analyze my email locally and locally tell me who I need to follow up with. If your analyzation code came to me, I wouldn't even mind if it did NLP and deeply datamined the emails to tell me who I may have missed following up with.

Ideally, I'd like to see unsecure e-mail replaced by crypto communication systems based on OTR and people locally storing their emails on Raspberry Pis, but that's dangerous stuff and I probably shouldn't have even said that.

Thing is, I'm sure you're nice guys and gals right now, but when you're billionaires and have 500 million people's digital data, evil you will turn.

By the way, good presentation at SVNewTech last night.

Re: E-mail is the Universal Platform

#16

Post by rvkennedy »

skevvis wrote: post #11
rvkennedy wrote: post #9

Sooner or later, email will either die or get better. The problem with email for most of its life was that there was little competition. Certainly SMTP has never had a serious rival. IMAP came to challenge POP, and won: this made email better. And Exchange has certainly set a standard that IMAP and webmail providers have had to meet. But it's not much compared to the seething shark tank that the web has been for the…

Completely agree with you that email will either die or get better. The timeline is the question. We haven't seen any strong competitors to the current incarnation of "e-mail" come and really threaten the core architecture. E-mail is too open, too standardized, too widely implemented to be quickly overtaken by any other solution. With Contactually, we started with that theory - e-mail is still, and will be for the fo…

I have the impression from your site that Contactually uses email as a principal interface for the service - I expect I'll find out more as you've intrigued me enough to sign up and try it out. I started out on the Comms project because most people I know find email a chore, and it seems like everyone is challenged to find their own solution to basically the same set of problems. My worry taking on a new service that uses mail as the user interface is that for many people, the whole problem with mail is the user interface. Did you consider doing it as (say) a Gmail plugin, rather than a service that mails the user?

Re: E-mail is the Universal Platform

#17

Post by ams6110 »

blueplastic wrote: post #13
skevvis wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree with you that email will either die or get better. The timeline is the question. We haven't seen any strong competitors to the current incarnation of "e-mail" come and really threaten the core architecture. E-mail is too open, too standardized, too widely implemented to be quickly overtaken by any other solution. With Contactually, we started with that theory - e-mail is still, and will be for the fo…

Did you totally miss Facebook's existence? Teenagers these days don't even use email. Facebook's sucking in the next generation's messages. Email's too slow and asynchronous they cry. Douglas Rushkoff would bet to differ, but anyway. Facebook's unified messaging was kind of interesting, but I might as well be CCing all my email to Kim Jong-un.

Big as it is, it's still closed. How do I communicate with a person on Facebook when I don't have a Facebook account (I don't). Email has no such barrier: if you have email -- from any provider -- you can email anyone else.

Re: E-mail is the Universal Platform

#18

Post by blueplastic »

E-mail is so broken fundamentally, that it's not even funny. I'm surprised more people aren't trying to replace it.

E-mail's based on the idea that it is free to message me and bother me and take a few precious seconds of my stream of consciousness.

If it's free to email people, then of course spammers will flood email channels with their deals and scams.

Ideally, I want a communications platform where only my 200 or so friends, co-workers and friends of friends can message me for free. Anybody else who wants to contact me has to send the message with a $1 bitcoin (interrupting my stream of conciousness price would be custom set by me, so lil' wayne would probably set his price at $75).

If the message from a stranger I got was in fact a cool dude I met at a party last weekend following up on that cat picture, then I'd click "reply and return" to give him back that bitcoin. If I see that the message is from a prince, I'd just ignore it and go buy some gum or something with his precious $1.

The current horrible e-mail architecture feeds giants like gmail, microsoft, yahoo b/c everyone is going to get tons of junkmail and people around 1999 had to start moving to cloud based providers who did free spam detection to parse through people's emails (Outlook Express sucked at spam cleaning). Problem is the web giants are snorting in everyone's private communications. It's as if the US Postal Service offered to deliver all mail for free, but in exchange opened everything and read it and if they thought this is something you shouldn't read or if this is marketing propaganda, so they won't deliver it to the recipient. I think pretty much everyone would think that's a crappyly architected postal service, but I guess with email we shouldn't be thinking about those kinds of things. Let's just figure out some new technical protocol instead, after IMAP and POP and SMTP will be replaced by SPDY or RESTful HTTP right? Yeah, let's build that instead.

True, e-mail is a universal platform, but it sucks.

Re: E-mail is the Universal Platform

#19

Post by ta12121 »

ams6110 wrote: post #17
blueplastic wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you totally miss Facebook's existence? Teenagers these days don't even use email. Facebook's sucking in the next generation's messages. Email's too slow and asynchronous they cry. Douglas Rushkoff would bet to differ, but anyway. Facebook's unified messaging was kind of interesting, but I might as well be CCing all my email to Kim Jong-un.

Big as it is, it's still closed. How do I communicate with a person on Facebook when I don't have a Facebook account (I don't). Email has no such barrier: if you have email -- from any provider -- you can email anyone else.

I thought you could specify a username and receive mail as foo@facebook.com.

Re: E-mail is the Universal Platform

#20

Post by dpapathanasiou »

rvkennedy wrote: post #9

Sooner or later, email will either die or get better. The problem with email for most of its life was that there was little competition. Certainly SMTP has never had a serious rival. IMAP came to challenge POP, and won: this made email better. And Exchange has certainly set a standard that IMAP and webmail providers have had to meet. But it's not much compared to the seething shark tank that the web has been for the…

Anyone who's interested in helping out, do get in touch.

What's your contact info?

I'm working on something related for project management and task planning (though it's more in sync with the premise of the original article and to a lesser extent with ccLoop) called TeamWork.io http://teamwork.io/

You can reach me through the contact form at that site, or via http://banrai.com/contact.html

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