Just as every business card in the world has a phone number on it, 20 years from now every business card in the world will still have an email address on it.
Email simply addresses one of the most basic needs of human communication: sending a written message to another person.
I'd argue the opposite. Email is going to experience a rebirth. Why? The reason why email declined at all was because of an ubiquitous messaging platform for the masses, SMS, while email wasn't nearly so (reading web email on a mobile device a few years ago was a rarity).
As mobile technology evolves, the use case for SMS disappears. Email apps become as ubiquitous on mobile devices as SMS apps.
And once that happens the "immediacy" advantage disappears. Today it is just as fast for me to send a quick email as it is for me to send a SMS. The speed is purely the software, where SMS was, in the past, the only one integrated with the phone contact list.
Now that your email and SMS accounts will tend toward having parity in the phone's software, I think the argument for 70 or 160 character limits disappears, especially on a phone (yes, people make the argument), where I'm already constrained by they keyboard and the fact that I'm usually on the go. And especially since on a mobile device, I HATE having to refactor my message to get the last 7 letters to fit.
The rebirth and re-emergence of email... it will look like a better SMS.
Also, note that SMS is charged per/SMS, whereas email is a few KB for a dataplan.
I suspect as dataplans become ubiquitous, IM and email will merge with/replace SMS. Possibly the whole business will reduce down to point-to-point and multicast messages in the end...
The problem with that is that many non-business people don't have audible notifications turned on for email. When I receive an SMS I know it's a real person and thus important, whereas when I receive an email it's probably a group-buying site email or a server notification or something else not worth interrupting me. Until we get much better prioritization tools, it'll be hard for SMS to replace email.
"every wall or chat posting makes unnecessary at least one e-mail, maybe several."
Really? The noisy little comments and messages on facebook would have been emails? He must have been getting a lot of one word emails then like "sup", "hey liked the post", "i agree", "nailed it", "you're wrong", "me too", "here's 20 completely irrelevant links", etc.
Email still serves a purpose (one that most of us rely on). Here's my question. What would impact your life more, the utter disappearance of email or the utter disappearance of Facebook?
Okay, not really; that would in fact ruin a lot of people's day. But from my selfish perspective, it would fix the only problem with quitting Facebook: All my friends are still using it.
Wrong on quite a few counts. He forgets to mention the email protocol - it is open in the true sense of the word and therefore is quite resilient. Also, the spam problem has been sufficiently solved at the moment afaik (Gmail is awesomely good at it.)
And, importantly, in the case of email, companies can host their own mail servers & thus better protect their data. Can you really imagine companies allowing facebook to host sensitive corporate communications?
Agreed. I prefer email or paper letters for any substantiative communication in my personal communication - at work, email is the communication medium. IM is available, but it far, far, far lags email.
These posts will only ever get on sites like HN with an inflammatory title. "Email on decline. Less critical." just isn't as edgy.
His core point, however, is obvious and hard to argue with. Just now I was thinking about a number of people who I used to email with regularly, yet we haven't exchanged emails in years now. Instead it's all texts, IMs, Facebook messages (which is like email...but not email), and so on. Email just dropped off the personal radar.
So now my email inbox is full of receipts from online purchases, and lots and lots of newsletters that I largely ignore. Because there isn't the higher draw value of personal content in there, I seldom do much more than scan it.
There's lots of Gmail love going on, here and in the comments on the original post. But notice the first few sentences of the post:
"I have in my computer every e-mail message I have sent or received since 1992. Minus the obvious spam, this database comes to about half a million messages..."
Gmail does not provide a local archive of mail messages, across the shifts in providers, mail clients, and addresses that occur over a couple of decades of using email. Gmail has some nice features, no doubt (I do use it myself), but it isn't a be-all, end-all email solution, particularly for those who need or would like to keep their email under local control.
Gmail's spam filtering is great, but it doesn't work 100% of the time. Some spam slips through to my inbox; what's worse, I have noticed a variety of false-positives (e.g., regular emails from mailing lists that I often delete but occasionally read aren't spam), meaning that I still must give the Spam folder a once-over before I delete its contents.
And, as far as I know, Gmail's spam filtering algorithm is proprietary. This means that the only way to get it is to route your email through Google, and accept the attendant trade-offs of doing so. Regardless of whether that works for you, it isn't a sustainable solution to spam to tell people to "just use Gmail."
I would much prefer to see a new Internet email protocol evolve, maybe something like what's described by this commenter (http://www.cringely.com/2010/11/the-decline-and-fall-of-e-ma...). Basically, if we move to a new standard protocol where something like the features of PGP are mandatory, then building (and filtering mail by) a distributed web of trust will become much easier. ISPs will migrate to this protocol because it will reduce their load and provide a better experience for their customers; et voila, we will have overcome the network effects hurdle that currently makes PGP essentially useless.
I don't quite understand what you mean by Gmail having no way to locally archive email. I use POP to locally cache all of my email on all my computers.
The ability to comment publicly on articles largely replaced emailed comments. But most people don't have blogs, and probably never will, so I wouldn't call that a sign email has fallen.
I find myself longing for less clever spam filters. Remember the good old days when you could claim that your spam filter ate someone's email? Ah, plausible deniability …
Spam killed email? Complaining about spam is something I only hear from people who don't use gmail. Prior to that I had a yahoo address. I still login a couple of times a year to keep it alive. Very occasionally I see a relevant message there but really it's 90% spam.I can't believe how bad yahoo still is for spam.
Also don't blame the spammer for spam. Blame people. Fact is, there wouldn't be spam if it didn't work. The ugly truth is that one person in a million who can't find porn or Viagra on the Internet by themselves pays for all the spam.
Facebook is obviously big now for communication but don't write off SMS yet because it has one thing all the messaging wannabes still don't: ubiquity.
Of course the fact that AT&T charges me 25 cents per SMS sent AND RECEIVED (no other country does this to my knowledge; certainly Australia and Europe don't) or I have to pay $90 for a pretty basic level of service (ludicrously high by OECD standards) is another story entirely...
Spam is really not an issue anymore. I've got some mail adresses that would receive hundreds of spam mails per day (those addresses are older than a decade now).
With fairly simple means I can block almost all of those mails on my own mailserver with practically zero false positives. In fact, the false positive rate was so low that I now directly reject those mails during the SMTP dialog. This frees me from checking my spam folder, and at the same time gives senders of legitimate mails (false positives) a notification that their mail has not been delivered.
[+] [-] gregschlom|15 years ago|reply
Email simply addresses one of the most basic needs of human communication: sending a written message to another person.
[+] [-] kenjackson|15 years ago|reply
As mobile technology evolves, the use case for SMS disappears. Email apps become as ubiquitous on mobile devices as SMS apps.
And once that happens the "immediacy" advantage disappears. Today it is just as fast for me to send a quick email as it is for me to send a SMS. The speed is purely the software, where SMS was, in the past, the only one integrated with the phone contact list.
Now that your email and SMS accounts will tend toward having parity in the phone's software, I think the argument for 70 or 160 character limits disappears, especially on a phone (yes, people make the argument), where I'm already constrained by they keyboard and the fact that I'm usually on the go. And especially since on a mobile device, I HATE having to refactor my message to get the last 7 letters to fit.
The rebirth and re-emergence of email... it will look like a better SMS.
[+] [-] p_nathan|15 years ago|reply
I suspect as dataplans become ubiquitous, IM and email will merge with/replace SMS. Possibly the whole business will reduce down to point-to-point and multicast messages in the end...
[+] [-] mnutt|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rapind|15 years ago|reply
Really? The noisy little comments and messages on facebook would have been emails? He must have been getting a lot of one word emails then like "sup", "hey liked the post", "i agree", "nailed it", "you're wrong", "me too", "here's 20 completely irrelevant links", etc.
Email still serves a purpose (one that most of us rely on). Here's my question. What would impact your life more, the utter disappearance of email or the utter disappearance of Facebook?
[+] [-] chadp|15 years ago|reply
I could not work or live without email however.
[+] [-] samatman|15 years ago|reply
Okay, not really; that would in fact ruin a lot of people's day. But from my selfish perspective, it would fix the only problem with quitting Facebook: All my friends are still using it.
[+] [-] chadp|15 years ago|reply
Also, business communication in every corner of this earth relies on email. That is not going to be going away any time soon.
The younger generation will have to use email when they get jobs.
[+] [-] petervandijck|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wladimir|15 years ago|reply
How many of these have we had since 1995?
Is it really really dead now? Even deader? Just like the phone? like snailmail? Old, simple, technologies are really resilient.
[+] [-] _grrr|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] p_nathan|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomjen3|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ergo98|15 years ago|reply
His core point, however, is obvious and hard to argue with. Just now I was thinking about a number of people who I used to email with regularly, yet we haven't exchanged emails in years now. Instead it's all texts, IMs, Facebook messages (which is like email...but not email), and so on. Email just dropped off the personal radar.
So now my email inbox is full of receipts from online purchases, and lots and lots of newsletters that I largely ignore. Because there isn't the higher draw value of personal content in there, I seldom do much more than scan it.
[+] [-] edw519|15 years ago|reply
Let texting, messaging, twitter, and Facebook become the platforms for noise.
The signal is just fine in my gmail inbox.
[+] [-] rwl|15 years ago|reply
"I have in my computer every e-mail message I have sent or received since 1992. Minus the obvious spam, this database comes to about half a million messages..."
Gmail does not provide a local archive of mail messages, across the shifts in providers, mail clients, and addresses that occur over a couple of decades of using email. Gmail has some nice features, no doubt (I do use it myself), but it isn't a be-all, end-all email solution, particularly for those who need or would like to keep their email under local control.
Gmail's spam filtering is great, but it doesn't work 100% of the time. Some spam slips through to my inbox; what's worse, I have noticed a variety of false-positives (e.g., regular emails from mailing lists that I often delete but occasionally read aren't spam), meaning that I still must give the Spam folder a once-over before I delete its contents.
And, as far as I know, Gmail's spam filtering algorithm is proprietary. This means that the only way to get it is to route your email through Google, and accept the attendant trade-offs of doing so. Regardless of whether that works for you, it isn't a sustainable solution to spam to tell people to "just use Gmail."
I would much prefer to see a new Internet email protocol evolve, maybe something like what's described by this commenter (http://www.cringely.com/2010/11/the-decline-and-fall-of-e-ma...). Basically, if we move to a new standard protocol where something like the features of PGP are mandatory, then building (and filtering mail by) a distributed web of trust will become much easier. ISPs will migrate to this protocol because it will reduce their load and provide a better experience for their customers; et voila, we will have overcome the network effects hurdle that currently makes PGP essentially useless.
[+] [-] phirephly|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Goladus|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ergo98|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wyclif|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SimplePast|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MicahWedemeyer|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] latch|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eegilbert|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cletus|15 years ago|reply
Also don't blame the spammer for spam. Blame people. Fact is, there wouldn't be spam if it didn't work. The ugly truth is that one person in a million who can't find porn or Viagra on the Internet by themselves pays for all the spam.
Facebook is obviously big now for communication but don't write off SMS yet because it has one thing all the messaging wannabes still don't: ubiquity.
Of course the fact that AT&T charges me 25 cents per SMS sent AND RECEIVED (no other country does this to my knowledge; certainly Australia and Europe don't) or I have to pay $90 for a pretty basic level of service (ludicrously high by OECD standards) is another story entirely...
[+] [-] gst|15 years ago|reply
With fairly simple means I can block almost all of those mails on my own mailserver with practically zero false positives. In fact, the false positive rate was so low that I now directly reject those mails during the SMTP dialog. This frees me from checking my spam folder, and at the same time gives senders of legitimate mails (false positives) a notification that their mail has not been delivered.
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] giantsquid|15 years ago|reply