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Mozilla Creates New Internet Mail and Communications Company
Mozilla has announced a new initiative to overhaul email and internet communications in general. The new company, MailCo, will be given $3 million in startup capital from Mozilla to start with the Thunderbird code and work from there. MailCo will be led by David Ascher of ActiveState fame and, according to him, will be a for-profit venture without the emphasis on profit.
If they want to make money, they should fix spam and privacy.
Email should have been designed with end to end encryption from the beginning.
And I'm tired of email being seen as just another database resource to be parsed for targeted advertising.
I actually don't have a problem with instant messaging. For example, my company uses our own IM product exclusively, because we are distributed all around the globe and many of us telecommute. Without IM, we'd be in a lot of pain. And for the world in general, IM is a different method of communication, rather than a version supplanting an already existing similar method. There's email, IM and telephone. But MySpace and similar "services" do nothing but erode these "big three".
It's sad that after decades of an evolving internet, the userbase is largely reverting to the sort of "singular resource" method of contact that we had to deal with on BBSes. That's ridiculous. If MySpace is down or slow (which it always is), you aren't able to communicate. Not to mention, you have little control over spam and you're giving all of your communications to the Fox News Corp databases.
There are so many people, however, who use ONLY social networks to communicate through and they rarely (if ever) check their email. It sucks to be essentially forced into creating an account somewhere and having to add it as one more point to check every day just in case those few people send you something. For these reasons, I hate social networks with a passion. They are seeking to consume eyeballs from users by taking over everything people typically use the internet for -- but constraining all of these services to one unreliable commercial network.
I just hope this trend does not continue.