Wholeheartedly agree with the article. I have absolute control of my inbox with filters, labels, and signing up for newsletters and/or updates on various subjects. There is no way a centralized end-to-end service is going to eclipse email for me, unless they radically change their business models.
The value proposition is just really bad in all the services I've seen so far.
"Oh, you want me to sign up for your service so that I can look at the content you think I should see alongside the ads you're making money off of? And what exactly is in it for me?"
Something I would pay for: a rolodex social network. No centralized feed. No useless info. Your profile is 2-3 sentences and your current city (with some sort of maps integration for when you travel, to see who's near you). Two buttons, one to request to view resume, and another to request to view email. That's it. With the idea being, you use the site to enable you to keep up with people. You add people you know or have worked with to your network, and you can easily get their current email and catch up when you're in the same city. Simple, no obnoxious ads, no slimy tactics to increase time on the site.
Probably will never come to pass, but I can dream...
"Something I would pay for: a rolodex social network. No centralized feed. No useless info. Your profile is 2-3 sentences and your current city (with some sort of maps integration for when you travel, to see who's near you). Two buttons, one to request to view resume, and another to request to view email. That's it. With the idea being, you use the site to enable you to keep up with people. You add people you know or have worked with to your network, and you can easily get their current email and catch up when you're in the same city. Simple, no obnoxious ads, no slimy tactics to increase time on the site."
I really want this too. I need some sort of simple contact rolodex that simply shows who I know, why I know them, and why they're important (where do they work, how do I know them, who are they connected to, etc.). Just a simple UI, something that I would use most of the time simply to search.
I recently gave serious thought to building something similar to a rolodex social network, but eventually poked too many holes in it to follow through.
I'd just come back from a conference at which I'd been asked for business cards by lots of people, maybe a hundred. Of all those people, I only really cared to hear back from a few. Though it's nice to have my name out there and be cordial in the industry, I wanted to place some kind of filter on all the vendor spam that inevitably followed. If...I could easily provide "redacted" or "enriched" contact info, maybe via QR on a smartphone screen, for instance, it would be possible to meter who gets which contact info without hurting any future networking opportunities.
If any of you can figure out how to make this work, I'd definitely pay for it.
You can use Facebook to accomplish everything you can do with your social network. Make your profile 2-3 sentences and your current city, allow people to request to see email, and just ignore the feed.
The advantage of course is that there's about a billion people already on it.
As this article alludes to: the heart of email's longevity, the thing that prevents it being closed by a single entity, is being a classical IETF protocol: federated, decentralized, open and interoperable.
The first two of those properties arise from being based on the DNS for SMTP endpoint discovery.
This is why every protocol needs to specify that it uses the DNS, and how.
And that is why I get so worried that the draft HTTP/2 editors so steadfastly refuses to do so.
It would be useful to draw a dependency graph of IETF and W3C protocols that characterizes each one on their degree of divergence from classical IETF values. Identify the point(s) in time where history took a wrong turn, revert to that point, fork and start over with new protocols. It can't be any less disruptive than new protocols which have a non-classical values.
Are there modern use cases for NNTP? Could UUCP be used for sneakernet or bluetooth intermittent mesh applications? What's the verdict on WebDAV, CalDAV and CardDAV as neutral protocols for sharing data, contacts & calendar?
The main power for me in email is that I actually own it. I have my own domain. While I use Slack, Google Hangouts, Hipchat and a bunch of other services, none of them replace email. It is standardized and despite social media/chat services living and dying over time I have had my domain and email for 15 years now. I can't think of many other services I can say that about.
It is also a good medium for non urgent communication that paper mail used to serve. The problem people see with email is actually not a problem at all with email, it is with how it is sometimes abused. My boss sometimes sends me an email and then prods me via Slack if I did not read it in 5 minutes. That is what these chat/message services are replacing... The short term action required requests that were formerly served with a phone call.
What I find interesting about people who say email is bad is they they almost all have some vested interest in another communication method, especially something proprietary...
Email will outlive everyone commenting here because it works. I run my own server so I know the NSA don't have direct access to content (although I always take note of any inbound messages that are flagged as not having used TLS, or where the other address is gmail etc.), I can make disposable addresses, addresses specific to websites (to identify sites that sell/leak your address), I can run my own spamfiltering that doesn't invade my privacy, I can DKIM sign my messages and have a provable way that only I sent the message, I can use PGP for any private information, I have a set of filters to classify email so I don't even need to spend that much time dealing with it, and I can access it from anywhere I can get an SSH client. No service does that.
I don't understand the point about college students viewing email as stale. I'm in college and email is used more than ever. I used to get tens of emails a day from various student groups (now they get sent to spam), and it is pretty much the easiest/fastest way for groups to communicate with each other.
Sure, email isn't "sexy" anymore, but that doesn't mean people of my generation don't appreciate it.
Is email our last success in popularizing an open and federated standard?
Maybe you can count OAuth, but IMO i have low confidence that we'll in the near future be able to collaborate on an open protocol so that many benefits of email such as control without vendor lock-in can be enjoyed.
We have too many entrenched interests by the main players. I have been working briefly on improving the exchange of trust/reputation data online, but it seemd for us that there was no alternative to a proprietary system if you wish to see widespread adoption.
> Is email our last success in popularizing an open and federated standard?
If you mean one with a distinct and separate S2S/federation protocol (SMTP) from the main C2S protocol(s) (POP/IMAP), probably.
OTOH, it could just be that separate S2S protocols are less favored in the first place -- the web is newer than email, open, and federated (in that web servers -- but doesn't have a separate S2S protocol. A web server that needs information from another web server to do its job uses HTTP just like any other client.
I don't think that entrenched interests are not the problem here. I think it's that a small private team can always out flank a standards committee. This difference is amplified when it's not clear exactly what needs to be built and a lot of iterative design is needed.
Email was one's passport and identity. Before Facebook became a true alternative for verifying one's identity on the web, the email address was how one accomplished serious things on the Internet. Want to verify a bank account? Email. Amazon? Email. Forums? Email. Even Facebook in the early days? Email.
Looking at Facebook's sign up page right now, and it seems that email is still required for registering a new account.
The thing is, almost every Internet service still requires an email address to sign up, and that ranges from mobile games to ecommerce shops. Some services provide the alternatives of allowing users to sign up via Facebook/Twitter/Google+; but in order for the users to get a Facebook/Twitter/Google+ account, they'll still need to sign up using an email address. Besides, almost all services that allow social network sign-in gives their users the option to sign up with email as well.
The services that do not allow email signups are few and far between -- like Medium.com, for example, but as said before, in order to get a Facebook or Twitter account, the user would still need an email address. Even mobile only apps like Whatsapp still appear to require an email address to sign up for their online support site.
I use gmail so that I get good operation cross device but it's heavily filtered so I only see a fraction of total email on my phone, but I can search everything.
I then pop everything off using fetchmail and process all emails down to zero once or twice a day using pine (either in Terminal or irssi connectbot on my xperia).
This suits me not only from a day to day perspective but also because if gmail locks me out for some reason I can easily route around it and still have a full
Want to verify a bank account? Email. Amazon? Email. Forums? Email. Even Facebook in the early days? Email.
This is a big part of why email continues to thrive. So many services have email baked in (e.g. a new WordPress install sends you an email). There are some services that let you choose between email and SMS, like plane reservations and banking alerts, but 95% of the time, any notification will come through email.
Given that, there is no way you could eliminate email without cutting off all those services in the process. Any new protocol to replace email would have to be a drop-in replacement for anything that currently sends out email or at least coexist peacefully alongside it.
You would think that if anyone could accomplish that it would be Facebook or Twitter, but I haven't seen any integration like that so far (e.g. get your plane reservation update or Amazon shipping confirmation by Twitter DM or Facebook message).
What if someone designed a new email protocol/etc from scratch without any reference to the existing one. Could it be made better? Can you even define what better is?
I seriously think that what we have is great. Send this text from here to there. It's so simple that almost anything can be done with it. If only social networking had followed the model of a simple protocol with distributed servers, we would have a serious alternative to Twitter's API restrictions and Facebook's privacy invasions.
That said, if we could redesign email, my quick wishlist would be:
* Better encryption. No surprises that a HN comment thinks we should encrypt metadata as well as contents, and have something better than the way we have to exchange GPG keys at the moment.
* Better security. Easier to guarantee that the ostensible sender of a message really did send it. Also, help prevent the viral problem of malware, which spreads through inboxes protected by rubbish passwords.
Actually, that's exactly what we are trying to do with AirDispatch [1].
We started out intending to "fix" email with a better protocol, and ended up creating something much greater.
The core problems that we tried to solve (to help define "better") were:
- Security: encrypting and authenticating your messages
- Control: the sender hosts the message, so they can edit or delete them before the receiver sees them
- Flexibility: all messages are, in fact, just key-value stores, so any type of data can be sent on the protocol (whether it's Mail, IMs, Vines, Instagrams, or whatever the flavor of the week social network is)
I think it's a great product, and we are going to start the developer release of the client (Melange [2]) tomorrow.
There are certainly things I would fix. Require all servers to be 8-bit clean, and default text to UTF-8. Sort out the rendering of HTML email, either using something that's more amenable to embedding in a fixed screen frame, or some more extensible standard to allow different types of document to be attached with dispositional settings. (In fact this is something I'd want to solve in general - embedding objects in webpages has long been a mess, to the point where we've resorted to specific <VIDEO> and <AUDIO> tags rather than trying to solve "embed another file in this web page" in a general way).
As another poster said, crypto everywhere and a permission system, from DNSSEC on down. Every assertion would carry a cryptographic chain of its authority.
Some kind of multi-user solution would be great. Mailing lists are a hack. To some extent NNTP filled this role though - maybe it's just a case of using the right protocol for the right job.
So yeah, it could definitely be made better - very few protocols are perfect. But it's done pretty well considering.
Of course. Lots of ideas in this direction. But be warned, thinking about new protocols is the first place engineers like us go without thinking about what getting adoption would really look like (which would be near impossible + need a backwards compatible beachhead imo).
I can never imagine how would a university/its various student organizations get their messages through to students, without email. I went on a full-year exchange to Chile, where the email service simply is useless and everybody(including university officials) seems to rely on Facebook, which to me was simply crazy. Why would something like FB be used for any serious business? How would they suppose that everybody has a FB account and likes to use it? That was a truly horrible experience, especially for a Social Network avoider like me.
People who think that email can die are the people who don't understand technology. Email is simply sending text from one user to another. There is nothing more simple than that. Therefore it probably won't die as long as we use text interfaces to our machines. What cute interfaces you put on top or machine learning features, that's all up to the marketing department. But all cool social networks and chat Apps can't do better than simply sending text.
Email will always be around, but I must say that "Email killers" are really going to be successful.
For example, I don't remember the last time my team sent an internal email that wasn't a forward from a client. We use Slack. Exclusively. We organize projects around it, sales efforts, everything. It has the async nature of email, the separation of topics like email, and the search power of email. It also means that none of us ever feel like we're out of the loop.
Unfortunately, the "nobody owns" feature of EMail is something Slack lacks and probably always will. Email is a federated, decentralized protocol of distributed mail servers that anybody can set up. Any email server can participate with any other email server. That's something that Slack will never have (it does interface with XMPP and IRC, but the service itself is centralized.)
It is hard to overstate how critical this fact is to Email's future. If you look at most of the canonical Internet protocols (SMTP, HTTP, DNS, XMPP, IRC, even BitCoin) - they have this fundamental feature in common. Even though they're part of the application layer of the Internet, they've become fundamental protocols that other technologies rely on. They are part of the infrastructure of the Internet.
I say this is someone who just started using Slack and loves it. I still can't see it replacing email, though.
I'm pretty firm in my belief that one of the great marketing moves of the 21st century is convincing people that email is not a social network. It's almost on par with making people believe that diamonds are romantic and a necessary part of the marriage ritual.
I think this has been helped by the general lack of innovation in the email space. From pretty basic mail, we ended up with a few (very surprisingly few) email clients and very little advancement on the original theme outside of html formatting and huge inboxes.
Lots of people dump on Microsoft, but one of the huge upsides of exchange is the tight integration of mail and calendar. From a conversation you can immediately schedule actions. Invites are even sent out over SMTP if I'm not mistaken. Getting a calendar to integrate well with gmail was one of the major accomplishments of web-based email, yet it seems like repeating this anywhere else is an accomplishment comparable to discovering cold fusion.
There's also been pitifully little work done in improving the experience of managing email and calendar servers. Managing spam is still a tremendous problem and all this adds up to most places, if they aren't using Exchange, just buying corporate Outlook.com or gmail accounts for their employees.
The problem of course is that for any serious advancement to really work, everybody (both client and server) have to move to support the advancement.
But one lesson to be learned from Facebook and G+ is that email can be replaced by an easier to use and friendlier system. There's a possibility of disruption, but it's obviously not in anybody's particular interest to keep reinventing email+otherstuff in this kind of highly centralized way. If Facebook goes down, there goes a huge chunk of the global communication system. At least with email I can be pretty sure my message is going to arrive at the destination at some point.
Another lesson to be learned is that social networks like Facebook are actually just a combination and integration of two (or three) common things that used to be all over the web: a personal website and email. You get a profile (which does a good enough approximation of the personal homepages of the web 1.0 days but actually a bit more like ) and people can message you (and more recently IM you). Basically a global presence you don't have to put much effort into to manage and a way to contact you. More importantly Facebook offers you various levels of control over who can see your presence and who can message you. Spam is almost unknown in Facebook's version of email.
So when I see distributed social network efforts like Diaspora, and all this talk of authentication and protocols and whatnot I wonder why we're not really using and extending the distributed infrastructure we already have. Even if we improve it in some way that makes it no longer work with the old email network, it won't be the first time a better internet service replaced a previous one (WWW replaced gopher for example) -- there's no reason two competing distributed messaging services can't run in parallel.
I'm convinced that Facebook took over messaging because it has one killer feature the 90s didn't: real names.
Contact points on Facebook are discoverable by real name based on the social graph, which is kind of a first in the history of communication. If someone mentions a John Doe in conversation, I can get in contact with the correct John Doe with a very high probability of success and no effort.
The PSTN, email, AIM, ICQ, MSN, etc. didn't offer that. They could have, but their communities developed with different norms. Facebook managed to get people to use their actual identities. That's a remarkable feat - not even Google could replicate it. But it's what made Facebook so useful and so addictive - it's about the actual lives of people I actually know.
Facebook does contain an analogue of "Web 1.0" personal webpages, but the action on Facebook is centered on the News Feed, which was sort of a new class of thing. Few people actually have profile information filled out; going to someone's Facebook page is just a way of filtering the News Feed to only content related to that person.
The real "Web 1.0" equivalent to Facebook would have been an RSS reader for all your friends' blogs. But for people to be comfortable blogging, they had to be able to (feel like they were) in control of their audience. Though Blogger, Wordpress, etc. supported user authentication, it would have been incredibly onerous compared to centralized identity. Which is more or less what Facebook became.
A truly open, distributed Facebook based on the "Web 1.0" would probably have looked something like an RSS reader that could authenticate to each friend's blog with OpenID. But it still would have lacked the ability to discover and search for people by real name that makes Facebook so useful.
There's nothing that prevents a non-Microsoft calendaring system from supplanting it, other than on agreeing on the protocol.
Email has MIME, there are calendar information formats (ical, IIRC), and various MIME handlers. The primary block was that Microsoft owned the corporate desktop, and competitors, until Google came along, couldn't agree on interoperable standards.
Facebook and Google win by being Web based and "in the cloud". Facebook had its social graph, Google had the fact that many users were relying on it for email, and increasingly, companies are.
There are any number of other problems surrounding mail, with privacy, spam, true federation (spam means residential/consumer IP space is virtually always blocked), and access from multiple devices being prime among them. Diaspora is interesting (I'm on it and active), but very small and growing slowly if at all. I do very much hope that some federated system (Diaspora, Friendica, FreedomBox, Sandstorm.io) will emerge, but it's a long and slow process.
I think the main thing keeping email as the baseline for communication on the internet is it's cost. There has been no other service that can provide such a varied yet simple medium of communication - text, images, video attachments with history and an audit-able trail - for free.
The closest that anyone has come have been the big social providers with messaging applications which mimic email in many respects. Even then, they are copying the email model with a branded version - not replacing it.
It will take an entirely new and different protocol that simplifies communication with the same or better capability scope to displace email.
Slack is obviously not killing emails as they are advertising through lot of PR. They have 150K active users so far. However one thing that they are correctly going after is fantastic search abilities for our own data that would include all emails, chat, attachments etc. My feeling is that eventually communication client that excels in search would indeed surface to the top. This client would then drive communication standards of the future, including emails. So in essence, problem is not integration of desperate sources of communication, but ability to search them efficiently.
Article is great, don't get me wrong (the people who understand email know why its such an awesome idea. when was the last time you could just fire off a message to a random server on the network, and it would make its way to the right inbox on the other side?).
The fact that you all decided to try to invent another social network is just atrocious.
I like this "rolodex" network: email on your phone, which just talks to the other people you email. Yeah.
Email and WWW provide everything proprietary services are providing people now, but with less flash. The problem is that so many people are moving to these proprietary services that it becomes very difficult to organize and communicate people without making that move. I needed to coordinate with multiple people, and one of them emailed me that we should start a group chat on Facebook; why not just cc them?
[+] [-] jabelk|11 years ago|reply
The value proposition is just really bad in all the services I've seen so far.
"Oh, you want me to sign up for your service so that I can look at the content you think I should see alongside the ads you're making money off of? And what exactly is in it for me?"
Something I would pay for: a rolodex social network. No centralized feed. No useless info. Your profile is 2-3 sentences and your current city (with some sort of maps integration for when you travel, to see who's near you). Two buttons, one to request to view resume, and another to request to view email. That's it. With the idea being, you use the site to enable you to keep up with people. You add people you know or have worked with to your network, and you can easily get their current email and catch up when you're in the same city. Simple, no obnoxious ads, no slimy tactics to increase time on the site.
Probably will never come to pass, but I can dream...
[+] [-] timjahn|11 years ago|reply
I really want this too. I need some sort of simple contact rolodex that simply shows who I know, why I know them, and why they're important (where do they work, how do I know them, who are they connected to, etc.). Just a simple UI, something that I would use most of the time simply to search.
[+] [-] verisimilidude|11 years ago|reply
I'd just come back from a conference at which I'd been asked for business cards by lots of people, maybe a hundred. Of all those people, I only really cared to hear back from a few. Though it's nice to have my name out there and be cordial in the industry, I wanted to place some kind of filter on all the vendor spam that inevitably followed. If...I could easily provide "redacted" or "enriched" contact info, maybe via QR on a smartphone screen, for instance, it would be possible to meter who gets which contact info without hurting any future networking opportunities.
If any of you can figure out how to make this work, I'd definitely pay for it.
[+] [-] nslamberth|11 years ago|reply
That idea is fantastic.
[+] [-] qq66|11 years ago|reply
The advantage of course is that there's about a billion people already on it.
[+] [-] inopinatus|11 years ago|reply
The first two of those properties arise from being based on the DNS for SMTP endpoint discovery.
This is why every protocol needs to specify that it uses the DNS, and how.
And that is why I get so worried that the draft HTTP/2 editors so steadfastly refuses to do so.
[+] [-] walterbell|11 years ago|reply
Are there modern use cases for NNTP? Could UUCP be used for sneakernet or bluetooth intermittent mesh applications? What's the verdict on WebDAV, CalDAV and CardDAV as neutral protocols for sharing data, contacts & calendar?
[+] [-] deathanatos|11 years ago|reply
Can you elaborate on what you mean here, for those of us in the dark?
[+] [-] specialp|11 years ago|reply
It is also a good medium for non urgent communication that paper mail used to serve. The problem people see with email is actually not a problem at all with email, it is with how it is sometimes abused. My boss sometimes sends me an email and then prods me via Slack if I did not read it in 5 minutes. That is what these chat/message services are replacing... The short term action required requests that were formerly served with a phone call.
[+] [-] blueskin_|11 years ago|reply
Email will outlive everyone commenting here because it works. I run my own server so I know the NSA don't have direct access to content (although I always take note of any inbound messages that are flagged as not having used TLS, or where the other address is gmail etc.), I can make disposable addresses, addresses specific to websites (to identify sites that sell/leak your address), I can run my own spamfiltering that doesn't invade my privacy, I can DKIM sign my messages and have a provable way that only I sent the message, I can use PGP for any private information, I have a set of filters to classify email so I don't even need to spend that much time dealing with it, and I can access it from anywhere I can get an SSH client. No service does that.
[+] [-] jeffreyrogers|11 years ago|reply
Sure, email isn't "sexy" anymore, but that doesn't mean people of my generation don't appreciate it.
[+] [-] rmrfrmrf|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nchuhoai|11 years ago|reply
Is email our last success in popularizing an open and federated standard?
Maybe you can count OAuth, but IMO i have low confidence that we'll in the near future be able to collaborate on an open protocol so that many benefits of email such as control without vendor lock-in can be enjoyed.
We have too many entrenched interests by the main players. I have been working briefly on improving the exchange of trust/reputation data online, but it seemd for us that there was no alternative to a proprietary system if you wish to see widespread adoption.
EDIT: I guess Bitcoin has good potential.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|11 years ago|reply
If you mean one with a distinct and separate S2S/federation protocol (SMTP) from the main C2S protocol(s) (POP/IMAP), probably.
OTOH, it could just be that separate S2S protocols are less favored in the first place -- the web is newer than email, open, and federated (in that web servers -- but doesn't have a separate S2S protocol. A web server that needs information from another web server to do its job uses HTTP just like any other client.
[+] [-] marcosdumay|11 years ago|reply
Isn't the Web younger?
[+] [-] tdaltonc|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] footpath|11 years ago|reply
Looking at Facebook's sign up page right now, and it seems that email is still required for registering a new account.
The thing is, almost every Internet service still requires an email address to sign up, and that ranges from mobile games to ecommerce shops. Some services provide the alternatives of allowing users to sign up via Facebook/Twitter/Google+; but in order for the users to get a Facebook/Twitter/Google+ account, they'll still need to sign up using an email address. Besides, almost all services that allow social network sign-in gives their users the option to sign up with email as well.
The services that do not allow email signups are few and far between -- like Medium.com, for example, but as said before, in order to get a Facebook or Twitter account, the user would still need an email address. Even mobile only apps like Whatsapp still appear to require an email address to sign up for their online support site.
[+] [-] yvsong|11 years ago|reply
Email is not an identity. Most people have multiple email addresses, and some people share some addresses.
[+] [-] mythealias|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arielpts|11 years ago|reply
Checkout Stripe.
[+] [-] jokoon|11 years ago|reply
applications die, protocols stay.
if your software solution use the web protocol, you're already limited by it. that's why I hate 99% of the internet techs.
[+] [-] lukeholder|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dools|11 years ago|reply
I use gmail so that I get good operation cross device but it's heavily filtered so I only see a fraction of total email on my phone, but I can search everything.
I then pop everything off using fetchmail and process all emails down to zero once or twice a day using pine (either in Terminal or irssi connectbot on my xperia).
This suits me not only from a day to day perspective but also because if gmail locks me out for some reason I can easily route around it and still have a full
backup of my email history.
[+] [-] keithpeter|11 years ago|reply
In order to enable pop3 though, I had to change a default gmail security setting. Have you had any issues at all since leaving pop enabled?
Using Kmail, I'm having to fetch each month's worth of email at a time. Can't find a setting anywhere so assume that is a Google thing.
[+] [-] byoung2|11 years ago|reply
This is a big part of why email continues to thrive. So many services have email baked in (e.g. a new WordPress install sends you an email). There are some services that let you choose between email and SMS, like plane reservations and banking alerts, but 95% of the time, any notification will come through email.
Given that, there is no way you could eliminate email without cutting off all those services in the process. Any new protocol to replace email would have to be a drop-in replacement for anything that currently sends out email or at least coexist peacefully alongside it.
You would think that if anyone could accomplish that it would be Facebook or Twitter, but I haven't seen any integration like that so far (e.g. get your plane reservation update or Amazon shipping confirmation by Twitter DM or Facebook message).
[+] [-] coldcode|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blowski|11 years ago|reply
That said, if we could redesign email, my quick wishlist would be:
* Better encryption. No surprises that a HN comment thinks we should encrypt metadata as well as contents, and have something better than the way we have to exchange GPG keys at the moment.
* Better security. Easier to guarantee that the ostensible sender of a message really did send it. Also, help prevent the viral problem of malware, which spreads through inboxes protected by rubbish passwords.
[+] [-] huntaub|11 years ago|reply
We started out intending to "fix" email with a better protocol, and ended up creating something much greater.
The core problems that we tried to solve (to help define "better") were:
- Security: encrypting and authenticating your messages
- Control: the sender hosts the message, so they can edit or delete them before the receiver sees them
- Flexibility: all messages are, in fact, just key-value stores, so any type of data can be sent on the protocol (whether it's Mail, IMs, Vines, Instagrams, or whatever the flavor of the week social network is)
I think it's a great product, and we are going to start the developer release of the client (Melange [2]) tomorrow.
[1] http://airdispat.ch
[2] http://github.com/melange-app/melange
[+] [-] lmm|11 years ago|reply
As another poster said, crypto everywhere and a permission system, from DNSSEC on down. Every assertion would carry a cryptographic chain of its authority.
Some kind of multi-user solution would be great. Mailing lists are a hack. To some extent NNTP filled this role though - maybe it's just a case of using the right protocol for the right job.
So yeah, it could definitely be made better - very few protocols are perfect. But it's done pretty well considering.
[+] [-] daigoba66|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karellan126|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Niten|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pinkyand|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AnonJ|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erikb|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3pt14159|11 years ago|reply
For example, I don't remember the last time my team sent an internal email that wasn't a forward from a client. We use Slack. Exclusively. We organize projects around it, sales efforts, everything. It has the async nature of email, the separation of topics like email, and the search power of email. It also means that none of us ever feel like we're out of the loop.
[+] [-] Aqueous|11 years ago|reply
It is hard to overstate how critical this fact is to Email's future. If you look at most of the canonical Internet protocols (SMTP, HTTP, DNS, XMPP, IRC, even BitCoin) - they have this fundamental feature in common. Even though they're part of the application layer of the Internet, they've become fundamental protocols that other technologies rely on. They are part of the infrastructure of the Internet.
I say this is someone who just started using Slack and loves it. I still can't see it replacing email, though.
[+] [-] blowski|11 years ago|reply
I remember people saying that in about 1998. Email killers have been successful, but not at killing email.
[+] [-] dsr_|11 years ago|reply
To do that to email, you'd have to dismantle DNS.
[+] [-] mverwijs|11 years ago|reply
I'm saddened and proud that every time I read that sentence, I initially think the person is using Slackware.
[+] [-] bane|11 years ago|reply
I think this has been helped by the general lack of innovation in the email space. From pretty basic mail, we ended up with a few (very surprisingly few) email clients and very little advancement on the original theme outside of html formatting and huge inboxes.
Lots of people dump on Microsoft, but one of the huge upsides of exchange is the tight integration of mail and calendar. From a conversation you can immediately schedule actions. Invites are even sent out over SMTP if I'm not mistaken. Getting a calendar to integrate well with gmail was one of the major accomplishments of web-based email, yet it seems like repeating this anywhere else is an accomplishment comparable to discovering cold fusion.
There's also been pitifully little work done in improving the experience of managing email and calendar servers. Managing spam is still a tremendous problem and all this adds up to most places, if they aren't using Exchange, just buying corporate Outlook.com or gmail accounts for their employees.
The problem of course is that for any serious advancement to really work, everybody (both client and server) have to move to support the advancement.
But one lesson to be learned from Facebook and G+ is that email can be replaced by an easier to use and friendlier system. There's a possibility of disruption, but it's obviously not in anybody's particular interest to keep reinventing email+otherstuff in this kind of highly centralized way. If Facebook goes down, there goes a huge chunk of the global communication system. At least with email I can be pretty sure my message is going to arrive at the destination at some point.
Another lesson to be learned is that social networks like Facebook are actually just a combination and integration of two (or three) common things that used to be all over the web: a personal website and email. You get a profile (which does a good enough approximation of the personal homepages of the web 1.0 days but actually a bit more like ) and people can message you (and more recently IM you). Basically a global presence you don't have to put much effort into to manage and a way to contact you. More importantly Facebook offers you various levels of control over who can see your presence and who can message you. Spam is almost unknown in Facebook's version of email.
So when I see distributed social network efforts like Diaspora, and all this talk of authentication and protocols and whatnot I wonder why we're not really using and extending the distributed infrastructure we already have. Even if we improve it in some way that makes it no longer work with the old email network, it won't be the first time a better internet service replaced a previous one (WWW replaced gopher for example) -- there's no reason two competing distributed messaging services can't run in parallel.
[+] [-] superuser2|11 years ago|reply
Contact points on Facebook are discoverable by real name based on the social graph, which is kind of a first in the history of communication. If someone mentions a John Doe in conversation, I can get in contact with the correct John Doe with a very high probability of success and no effort.
The PSTN, email, AIM, ICQ, MSN, etc. didn't offer that. They could have, but their communities developed with different norms. Facebook managed to get people to use their actual identities. That's a remarkable feat - not even Google could replicate it. But it's what made Facebook so useful and so addictive - it's about the actual lives of people I actually know.
Facebook does contain an analogue of "Web 1.0" personal webpages, but the action on Facebook is centered on the News Feed, which was sort of a new class of thing. Few people actually have profile information filled out; going to someone's Facebook page is just a way of filtering the News Feed to only content related to that person.
The real "Web 1.0" equivalent to Facebook would have been an RSS reader for all your friends' blogs. But for people to be comfortable blogging, they had to be able to (feel like they were) in control of their audience. Though Blogger, Wordpress, etc. supported user authentication, it would have been incredibly onerous compared to centralized identity. Which is more or less what Facebook became.
A truly open, distributed Facebook based on the "Web 1.0" would probably have looked something like an RSS reader that could authenticate to each friend's blog with OpenID. But it still would have lacked the ability to discover and search for people by real name that makes Facebook so useful.
[+] [-] dredmorbius|11 years ago|reply
Email has MIME, there are calendar information formats (ical, IIRC), and various MIME handlers. The primary block was that Microsoft owned the corporate desktop, and competitors, until Google came along, couldn't agree on interoperable standards.
Facebook and Google win by being Web based and "in the cloud". Facebook had its social graph, Google had the fact that many users were relying on it for email, and increasingly, companies are.
There are any number of other problems surrounding mail, with privacy, spam, true federation (spam means residential/consumer IP space is virtually always blocked), and access from multiple devices being prime among them. Diaspora is interesting (I'm on it and active), but very small and growing slowly if at all. I do very much hope that some federated system (Diaspora, Friendica, FreedomBox, Sandstorm.io) will emerge, but it's a long and slow process.
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|11 years ago|reply
The closest that anyone has come have been the big social providers with messaging applications which mimic email in many respects. Even then, they are copying the email model with a branded version - not replacing it.
It will take an entirely new and different protocol that simplifies communication with the same or better capability scope to displace email.
[+] [-] sytelus|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LeicaLatte|11 years ago|reply
I don't see cloud designs of now working on top of standards like email does. No wonder data tends to get stuck in silos these days.
[+] [-] smaudet|11 years ago|reply
Article is great, don't get me wrong (the people who understand email know why its such an awesome idea. when was the last time you could just fire off a message to a random server on the network, and it would make its way to the right inbox on the other side?).
The fact that you all decided to try to invent another social network is just atrocious.
I like this "rolodex" network: email on your phone, which just talks to the other people you email. Yeah.
Social networks are a fad.
[+] [-] tatterdemalion|11 years ago|reply