Slashdot Mirror
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.
> 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.
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
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.