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Yet Another Premature Declaration of Email's Death
mvip tips the latest in a long line of premature announcements of the demise of email. "The Wall Street Journal article Why Email No Longer Rules is making the rounds online. Fast Company provided a fast response, highlighting the technical shortcomings of trying to replace email with Facebook and Twitter (where do the attachments go?). Email Service Guide points out that Facebook and Twitter are ineffective for one-off communications. With Google Wave on the horizon, we'll probably have to go through the whole charade yet again."
The article in question is not saying email is dying. In fact, it says email usage is growing:
> Little wonder that while email continues to grow, other types of communication services are growing far faster.
No, not "dying". Just perhaps not peoples first choice for today's on-line communications.
It's interesting to bring up Facebook here, because, while it does allow us a much better way to communicate with our friends, it also is not an "email killer". In fact, it makes integral use of email. I get emails all the time telling me that someone "commented on my status".
> We should not get rid of E-mail so much as improve it. E-mail could be easily
> improved by adding ideas such as threading which would quite easily overcome > the complicated mess that is quoting.
Everything needed for threading is already there in the "References:" header line and decent MUAs such as Gnus fully support it.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
While most of my computers and my iPhone use the cloud email (Imap). My laptop is set to download it pop style. A script to move them and mark them as read is done. This way ihave the best of both worlds when email fails.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
No, email is best effort delivery.
To be fair, Wave is being developed as an open standard. Google is opening the protocol. They will also maintain an open source reference implementation for anyone to deploy in their own corner of the 'net.
'No publisher will ever pay you enough to successfully sue them' - Dave Sim
How is this different from Wave? Google may have put together the standard, but anyone can create their own Wave server with 0 ties to google. Its designed to be a replacement for SMTP in every way, including its non-reliance on a central authority.
There's a very subtle hide link next to them, you can remove all status messages related to specific games. It went away when they redesigned recently but it seems to be back again.
Google Wave is actually all three of those forms. I've had instant-messenger style chats on Wave between me and my boss. We've started using it to replace email in some situations (something that will open up once there are other Wave clients.) And, of course, you can broadcast the communication out to anyone in Wave, and even outside of it with certain robots.