Email is like the one and only vendor/device/programming language independent way of communication.
IRC?
Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”
51–60 of 151 posts
Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”
#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 who you are - whether the recipient is your oldest friend, your granddaughter, your boss's boss, or Beyoncé. The year the web was born, this flattening effect was astonishing. Anyone in an organization could communicate directly and immediately with anyone else, "regardless of rank" [...]"
- Adrienne LaFrance, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/what-...
I'd like to add one more very important aspect: you don't need to register with any or with yet another service, which will eventually fade into oblivion within a few years - or which will become so ignorant to privacy, like Facebook, that you end up deleting their apps and accounts.
Email is a set of protocol and thus it _will_ outlive any centalised, closed, walled garden.
(BTW this is what decentralisation people should understand: you need to build services using common protocols, not services which can be installed; mastodon is a bad example, activityfeeds or linked data are good ones)
Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”
#53The most important thing about email is that you get your own, immutable copy of every message. You can keep your copy and know that it will be exactly the same when you look at it next week, it won't have been silently (or even not silently) "corrected". It's both a blessing and a curse, as anybody who's accidentally emailed the wrong people or hit send before finishing editing knows, but it's the most powerful thin…
That is only one important aspect. It's also provider-independent (as long as you own the domain, that is true) and is, by nature, decentralised. (Like really decentralised, even by redundancy provaded by MX record priority in DNS.)
Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm surprised we haven't seen the mIRC's of email yet (or maybe there have but that just didn't work?). mIRC was a popular client for IRC on Windows. It extended IRC with features such as color and formatting in your messages, which was beyond the protocol. A feature like that worked just fine because the color codes were mostly invisible to those who weren't using a client that supported them. In this way, mIRC and…
I've been thinking about this a lot lately--I'd really love in-email applications, especially with Web Assembly working its way into viability. Being able to act on stuff without leaving my inbox would be fantastic. Unfortunately, lots of potential for abuse and also the fact that email protocol is so entrenched.
So...Lotus Notes?
Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”
#55Maybe 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…
Messaging apps like WeChat and Slack are really too ephemeral for discussion and documentation of serious business matters, in my experience.
Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”
#56Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”
#57Sorry to be negative but 300k subs for an email newsletter is not a lot.
If they do read it, it's massive.
I hope you don't think millions will actually read newsletters.
Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”
#58This is an interesting alternative to having a newspaper website: a newspaper via email.
Not the first, I'm sure, but possibly the best organised.
Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”
#59I was intrigued, so I just looked at the "Inside Premium" plan -- $10/mo for one newsletter?? You can get a digital subscription to Washington Post and NYT for basically half that!
NYT and Netflix are an exceptional value at $10 a month, but those are large scale consumer content. In the B2B content space, any content that saves folks a couple of hours a week is worth a LOT of money. in this case, $10-25 a month is nothing... really, it's like zero dollars in the context of a business executive making six figures.
I'm a business executive making six figures ;)
Still not sure I'd pay for it out of pocket (but who knows!), but I missed the B2B angle on the first read and was reacting to the price point as a news consumer. IMO neither the article nor the premium page does a great job of showing me that kind of value -- the only allusions to B2B value I saw were "research reports" in the article and "let us be your research team" on the page. But I suppose that's because you're still figuring out what premium should be.
Hope you figure it out and wishing you success here. I love me some email.
Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”
#60e-mail seems to be dying fast. I have several friends (all under 30) who are only reachable via facebook or SMS; e-mail is an afterthought.
That's complete nonsense. Once people grow older (the one's who have the money for your product), email is the standard. No one sits on text messaging all day to communicate any real business.
I don't know most of my friends' email addresses, and those I do know, I wouldn't be sure that they are actually checking them. I'm 32.