E-mail is the Universal Platform • Hacker News Board

Re: E-mail is the Universal Platform

#31

Post by zdw » Thu, Jan 05, 2012, 12:31 AM UTC

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…

QMTP is a good start, if only because it's simple and 8-bit clean.

http://cr.yp.to/proto/qmtp.txt

Put inside CurveCP and a ton of security problems would also be solved.

Re: E-mail is the Universal Platform

#32

Post by kooshball » Thu, Jan 05, 2012, 12:35 AM UTC

blueplastic wrote: post #18

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…

> 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.

USPS has a large list of Restricted Matters that you're not allowed to send. It's ridiculous to think they would never "inspect" your package in anyway.

Re: E-mail is the Universal Platform

#33

Post by bane » Thu, Jan 05, 2012, 1:52 AM UTC

I'm almost convinced at this point if somebody simply built a facebook like interface, and used email as the messaging protocol, but didn't display it like an email, more like a FB conversation (as opposed to a threaded or gmail-like conversation view), that it would be used. There's not really much that's offered by alternate messaging solutions that email can't do if it existing in the right sort of framework:

1) Person-to-person? Check

2) Person-to-group? Check

3) Group-to-group? Check

4) Group-to-person? Check

5) Multimedia? Check

6) Fancy formatting? Check

7) Attached files? Check

8) Near real-time? Check (most of the time)

9) Deliver Fault tolerant? Check

10) Federated/distributed? Check

Why everybody seems to want to reinvent email is beyond me. About the only thing that FB or G+ offer is the storage of a server-side contact list so I don't have to remember their email address and the use of a white-list for sender/receivers so I don't get spam. Offer the same with email and a decent web interface and you've basically recreated any "modern" social network, except it'll be built on a time-tested, robust protocol that's already ubiquitous across the internet and already has billions of users.

edit I guess what I'm saying is that it's the application layer (server and client side) in the email equation that needs most of the rework, not the protocol layers.

Re: E-mail is the Universal Platform

#34

Post by hammock » Thu, Jan 05, 2012, 2:32 AM UTC

blueplastic wrote: post #18

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…

I understand your dislike of spam, but what's the rationale behind building in the filtration into the architecture? That's merely a constraint on what email already offers, not an evolution.

Right now spam filtration is decentralized (as it should be), and there's NOTHING stopping an email provider like Gmail or Hotmail or [fill in your new startup] from CHARGING senders a fee to actually deliver mail to your personal inbox.

If you think your charge-per-message makes sense, then build your own email server that intercepts incoming messages and makes sure they've been paid for before distributing them to you (or your customers). No one is stopping you.

Re: E-mail is the Universal Platform

#35

Post by hammock » Thu, Jan 05, 2012, 2:38 AM UTC

hammock wrote: post #34

blueplastic wrote: post #18

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…

I understand your dislike of spam, but what's the rationale behind building in the filtration into the architecture? That's merely a constraint on what email already offers, not an evolution. Right now spam filtration is decentralized (as it should be), and there's NOTHING stopping an email provider like Gmail or Hotmail or [fill in your new startup] from CHARGING senders a fee to actually deliver mail to your person…

By the way, if there WAS a centralized spam filtration somewhere, as you seem to be proposing, there would still be "a giant" snooping everyone's mail. Or did you not realize that.

Re: E-mail is the Universal Platform

#36

Post by Joakal » Thu, Jan 05, 2012, 3:36 AM UTC

bane wrote: post #33

I'm almost convinced at this point if somebody simply built a facebook like interface, and used email as the messaging protocol, but didn't display it like an email, more like a FB conversation (as opposed to a threaded or gmail-like conversation view), that it would be used. There's not really much that's offered by alternate messaging solutions that email can't do if it existing in the right sort of framework: 1) P…

I wrote about this too: http://joakal.com/2011/09/27/the-social-network-killer-like-...

Re: E-mail is the Universal Platform

#37

Post by chetan51 » Thu, Jan 05, 2012, 4:33 AM UTC

bane wrote: post #33

I'm almost convinced at this point if somebody simply built a facebook like interface, and used email as the messaging protocol, but didn't display it like an email, more like a FB conversation (as opposed to a threaded or gmail-like conversation view), that it would be used. There's not really much that's offered by alternate messaging solutions that email can't do if it existing in the right sort of framework: 1) P…

I agree with most of what you said, except that the real-time aspect is not real-time enough. If email were actually real-time, then it could completely replace instant messaging as well. Right now it's lacking.

Re: E-mail is the Universal Platform

#38

Post by losvedir » Thu, Jan 05, 2012, 4:53 AM UTC

blueplastic wrote: post #18

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…

It's a good idea, though not a new one. Bill Gates suggested this very idea in his book The Road Ahead. I must have read it 15 years ago when I was in elementary school and have always wondered why no one's gone ahead and implemented it.

Re: E-mail is the Universal Platform

#39

Post by bane » Thu, Jan 05, 2012, 5:00 AM UTC

chetan51 wrote: post #37

bane wrote: post #33

I'm almost convinced at this point if somebody simply built a facebook like interface, and used email as the messaging protocol, but didn't display it like an email, more like a FB conversation (as opposed to a threaded or gmail-like conversation view), that it would be used. There's not really much that's offered by alternate messaging solutions that email can't do if it existing in the right sort of framework: 1) P…

I agree with most of what you said, except that the real-time aspect is not real-time enough. If email were actually real-time, then it could completely replace instant messaging as well. Right now it's lacking.

True, which is probably why google put im right next to the message viewer in gmail. I know of many ocassions where a flurry of emails turned into an im session.

I think gmail's "conversations" are really the first try at what I'm talking about, a new front end on email, but I don't think they work well enough personally. And they haven't really expanded well on the concept recently.

Re: E-mail is the Universal Platform

#40

Post by chetan51 » Thu, Jan 05, 2012, 5:16 AM UTC

bane wrote: post #39

chetan51 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with most of what you said, except that the real-time aspect is not real-time enough. If email were actually real-time, then it could completely replace instant messaging as well. Right now it's lacking.

True, which is probably why google put im right next to the message viewer in gmail. I know of many ocassions where a flurry of emails turned into an im session. I think gmail's "conversations" are really the first try at what I'm talking about, a new front end on email, but I don't think they work well enough personally. And they haven't really expanded well on the concept recently.

Google Wave was really what I thought the ideal marriage between email and IM. Why did it fail again?