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Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

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Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#121

Post by ImaCake »

majormajor wrote: post #49
azurezyq wrote: post #33

Maybe in US this holds, but things may be different in different places. I'm a Chinese living in the bay area. I think people here treat E-mails as part of their daily life probably because most of them began to use it before the mobile internet is a thing. On the contrary, in China where the majority internet users are mobile-savvy, WeChat is the new email. Actually E-mails are only for official communications there…

Yeah, there's a big list of global differences around "what technology was around when these systems started getting built." Results in a weird mix of things looking both more and less futuristic than wherever home is in certain places; for me this was most striking when visiting Japan a while back and seeing how automated with vending machines and such a lot of ramen shops were compared to the US, but at the same ti…

I was in Japan last year, and I found the the ramen shop vending machines to very useful and reliably good at their job. What struck me as weird in Japan was the dominance of flip phones. I think they use them for credit card transactions and email which they pioneered earlier. So when smartphones came along, they didn't adopt them as rapidly as the US or Australia.

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#122

Post by spookyuser »

squiggy22 wrote: post #120
RandomInteger4 wrote: post #4

This is tangential, but needs to be stated: What I've learned from email newletters is that Microsoft Outlook needs to die a swift and horrible death. There is absolutely no good reason why we should have to create email newsletters that require tables for layout.

Web based mail clients are nearly as bad with how much CSS etc. they strip out. Gmail is particularly aggressive. Yes Outlook is terrible, but there's plenty of security conscious developers throwing baby out with bathwater when it comes to email design .

I don't know how inbox does it, but I like how some newsletters are rendered on it, the product hunt newsletter shows up as just the top three/four posts of the day.

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#123

Post by eli »

Spivak wrote: post #38
eli wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, unless you try to use an HTML layout technique more modern than tables and spacer gifs.

I think you'll find a lot more push back on using HTML in emails at all.

Only among the HN crowd, not at all from my users.

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#124

Post by jimktrains2 »

TomMarius wrote: post #102
jimktrains2 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still lose history if my bouncer goes offline.

You don't lose anything (assuming your whole team uses the same bouncer, which is a good solution, IMO), logs will remain saved on the disk drive, but people will be unable to connect. Personally I have a bouncer running on a VPS since 2008 with 100% uptime so far, costs me $3/month and is used by 10 people.

If my bouncer goes down, I don't have the history for the period for which it was down. Congrats on 100% uptime, but that's not the numbers one should plan by.

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#125

Post by corobo »

gramakri wrote: post #68
pmlnr wrote: post #52

"[...] People seem to hate email for the same reasons they once loved it. Email's underlying triumph, the quality that made it revolutionary, was that you could instantly deliver a written message to someone even if they weren't there to receive it. [...] Email is neutral, meaning that anyone can email anyone else with an email address. If you have a person's email address, your message will be delivered no matter wh…

> Email is a set of protocol and thus it _will_ outlive any centalised, closed, walled garden. What stops email going the way of XMPP?

Enterprise usage

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#126

Post by lunchables »

cbhl wrote: post #82
alexmat wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened to XMPP? Not trying to be snarky, I still use it. Is there an issue I should be aware of?

The big companies gave up on it. Google, Facebook, etc. Everyone wants their product to be the new hotness. See the copying of stickers, voice messages, and payments from Chinese/Japanese messaging products. Or how Skype became a Snapchat clone.

>Or how Skype became a Snapchat clone.

Couldn't believe this so I had to google it:

https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/skypes-snapchat-inspired-m...

Sorry for doubting you! Wow.

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#127

Post by codebeaker »

azurezyq wrote: post #33

Maybe in US this holds, but things may be different in different places. I'm a Chinese living in the bay area. I think people here treat E-mails as part of their daily life probably because most of them began to use it before the mobile internet is a thing. On the contrary, in China where the majority internet users are mobile-savvy, WeChat is the new email. Actually E-mails are only for official communications there…

Chiming in to share an anecdote from yesterday, I was in the MacStore and there was what I'd describe as a totally normal early 20s white guy there, they asked him for an email address to send his confirmation or sth, and he was like "dude, I don't really use email, can I not get an SMS or something?" …… turns out that's not possible, so he gave them a friend's email address, the same one (his friend's) that he uses for his iCloud account.

I found it kind of strange, anyway.

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#128

Post by notyourwork »

a3_nm wrote: post #105
quanticle wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of adoption? How many users does XMPP have? I'm glad that XMPP is open, but as a standard, it's useless to me if none of my friends are using services that support it.

Not sure about the actual statistics, but XMPP is not just a standard for messaging between people: I think it's also intended as a backend technology for communication behind automated services. So even though there may not be many humans using XMPP as a messaging application, there may be many people who "use it" without noticing (as in, use a website, etc., which relies on XMPP somewhere).

I don't have experience with xmpp protocol but how is it better than an http or soap for example?

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#129

Post by pinwale »

huhweirdyhat wrote: post #69
azurezyq wrote: post #33

Maybe in US this holds, but things may be different in different places. I'm a Chinese living in the bay area. I think people here treat E-mails as part of their daily life probably because most of them began to use it before the mobile internet is a thing. On the contrary, in China where the majority internet users are mobile-savvy, WeChat is the new email. Actually E-mails are only for official communications there…

When you lease an apartment, do you get the details via WhatsApp/WeChat/TodaysChatApp or email? How about receipts, bank statements, anything where deliverability actually matters? Email is infrastructure; people invest in it. If the only people investing in these chat apps are themselves people, these apps could be ghost towns in years. In some sense you're right; in another sense, it still seems like email is likel…

In China, you will probably do all of the above in WeChat rather than email. Whenever I need to conduct business with someone in China, it's always over WeChat rather than email.

One of the Chinese court systems actually sends notifications through their WeChat account. I believe there are even pilot programs where you can initiate court cases through WeChat as well.

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#130

Post by pinwale »

r00fus wrote: post #61
azurezyq wrote: post #33

Maybe in US this holds, but things may be different in different places. I'm a Chinese living in the bay area. I think people here treat E-mails as part of their daily life probably because most of them began to use it before the mobile internet is a thing. On the contrary, in China where the majority internet users are mobile-savvy, WeChat is the new email. Actually E-mails are only for official communications there…

I think it's a bit reductionist to say "X is the new ". Especially when X is proprietary. Email is a standard. There are multiple providers. It's a great lowest-common-denominator. Does any company really want a part of that without changing the above? I thought Uber establishing a "defacto standard" for ride-sharing which can be copied by competitors is one of the strategy points we criticize here on HN? I don't kno…

> Email will be still around when WeChat is dead and gone.

I highly doubt that. WeChat is so deeply embedded in daily life in China that I would almost consider it required to do anything substantial in China.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/world/china-watch/technology...

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