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."
That's all it comes down to.
But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun.
Why wait for a response to an email when you get a quicker answer over instant messaging?
Because you don't always need some response within 15 secs, nor do you want to always be responding to some questions that take away your time and concentration. Even if you have your email client open all the time, you can leave writing a reply to it for later time.
If you know you need a quicker response, you send an IM or call my phone. Something in between and you send an SMS.
For that matter I dont want everyone to know everything about me, I dont want everyone to know I'm available or not, I dont want everyone to know all the other people I know, nor do I want everyone to know something that only certain people should know.There's also no way you'll get me to install facebook or twitter apps on my phone. If I'm not on computer, there's no need to contact me other way than calling me (and I dont even always keep my phone with me - if I'm busy with other stuff, I'll call you back on better time)
Long live email.
Because it doesn't require my instantaneous attention and I get to control when I reply.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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.
i find google wave rather annoying. maybe because too few of my friends are on it, maybe because it's a whole new way of "emailing." maybe because it's not meant as a communication tool but rather as a collaboration tool. Either way, I don't see it replacing email anytime soon. or ever.
-- All this knowledge is giving me a raging brainer.
... things like Facebook and Google Wave is that surely not everybody subscribes to them. I certainly don't want a million different accounts, and nor will bother with Google Wave. Everybody has email though.
Facebook, Google, Twitter, whatever, are "single-source vendors" of their particular products, and they can be subject to any kind of financial, moral, political, or technological problems.
E-mail has no such dependencies. The only way to take it down is to take down the Internet in general. (Spam overloading aside.)
In fact, I think I'll send them an email right now to let them know.
i'll put my hands up and say i've not read the article - and i'll certainly not be wasting my time doing so.
but is anyone really so stupid to think that email (which is based upon open standards and is already running on hundreds of thousands of servers and comes installed by default on most servers) will ever be replaced by fecebook and twatter???
a few years ago i guess the same idiots would also be including myspaz on that list too? (and what is next years fad?)
email dying? pffffft - what a bunch of idiots (can't they see that?)
The main shortcoming of Facebook is archival. Other than that, it's far superior for personal communication that I might otherwise do over email.
But archival is not worth the danger. My grandchildren, if they care about my correspondence, will have my email folders to look through to learn a bit about those that came before them.
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.
So the call is for a collaboration / communication system which works like email but can pull in large groups that has an open standard.
Sounds like a call to bring back and update Usenet.
In related news, Nemertes President Johna Till Johnson is still convinced that the internet will meet its end by 2010. Back in 2007 they claimed that the "exponential" growth in demand for bandwidth will butt up against the "linear" investment in networking technology causing brownouts and no internet by 2010. And as recently as May of 2009, they have been still saying this! Then in October 1st the same company claimed that Net Neutrality will end the internet (or at least as we know it). Which causes me to wonder ... what kind of business model is Nemertes running? Do they stand to profit from this FUD or establish themselves as expert prophets if one of these things happens?
... why would the WSJ throw their journalistic integrity on the line for this kind of news? What did they gain at the risk of look like Popular Mechanics who in 1951 speculated we would all have personal helicopters in our garage?
Really, the biggest question is
My work here is dung.
Would you trust Facebook, with its odd history of rights control, with a corporate Excel file?
Hell no. I wouldn't even trust Facebook to reassure my mother about a doctor's visit, or talk to my brother about his family. It's creepy the things people use social networking tools for, sometimes. It's like going down to the local bar and yelling out the results of your blood tests to whatever yobboes happened to be in earshot.
Yes, technically, email can be intercepted. So can phone calls and physical letters. And someone can be listening in on you in the restaurant, even if you keep your voice down. But... damn...
I tried to RTFA (well, not the first one, but the response from Fast Co) and failed. I got as far as:
(the first five words) and gave up. I'm a tech fan, but Twitter just doesn't interest me as it is. Making communication that short and easy just leads to drivel (or people using Twitter as an RSS feed for their site - I'll watch the site and its real RSS feed, thank you). Threading is hopeless in things like Twitter and while it might be semi-useful for faster conversations, it won't be as good as a proper IM client for a group chat.
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to replacing email. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can still use the service, so it has no benefit over email.
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(X) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
(X) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for messaging
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(X) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
(X) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
(X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(X) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
(X) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
(X) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Email is the killer app. These other thingies are nice niche addons(plugins!?) but they won't replace email.
The only major nuisance to email is slight visual noise. (I DON'T count spam! I mean legit notes.) It might be nice to have a 1-click "you have a phone call" for the frontline admins. But darn near EVERYTHING else gains value from being logged.
Anyone who thinks they can super-promote twitter-clones is forgetting the lovely CYA bit.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Most people I know (non-techies) use Outlook for work communication and Facebook for friend communication. I can't help feeling that if Sharepoint was all that Microsoft promised it would be, we'd be using it for work communication like we use Facebook. But when people have to call IT support to ask how to move a document from one folder to another, it's not going to get that far...
Someone please send this article to all of the spammers. That way, they'll all move to Fecesbook. I don't have a Fecesbook account, so I don't have to see their spam (for that matter, I'd rather read Viagra ads than "25 Things About Me" pages anyway).
Email isn't going anywhere. Fecesbook is a fad. Everyone has an email account. Email is also (in theory at least) guaranteed delivery.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
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.
I think that Facebook and Twitter will die before email, because email has not a propertary service and FB an TW are owned by someone.
As a ccmail consultant i'm still hoping!
No, email is best effort delivery.
Do you have some solution to the "attachment problem"?
There are (many) instances when you need to send a document or some other file to someone via email. I agree that email is not a *good* storage medium, but how is it not valid?
If you live in a rich-media world - iPhone for example - where you never have "just text" you can't contemplate a world where "just text" will do.
There are several incarnations of this. Mac vs DOS, Windows vs Linux, GUI vs Command line, and now "Wave" vs eMail.
Those who use "just text" know it will work anywhere. Those who are immerse in rich-media will push the envelope of user experience.
Is one better than the other? I don't think so. Will one prevail over the other? Doubtful. Will you use Google Wave or some other social networking - most probable - if only to have a look. Should you get rid of your POP/IMAP/SMTP servers? I wouldn't (and wont').
-CF
Well, let me give you a bit about my workplace: No cell phones (or any derivative thereof) allowed in, they stay in the car. Networking uses WebSense with every conceivable word the Christian Right hate to use on the "Dirty Word List" and block any site the even hints of a smell of "Social Networking" is blocked. Any type of streamed video, I.E, CNN, YouTube etc... are blocked. Anything that resembles online messaging is also blocko!!! What am I trying to say, at our workplace, we [[ live & die by email ]] it's our life blood, so we always muse at these prognosticators who get so wound up in the 'pop' culture of these networking sites that they dis everything else around them. Sigh.
Finishing the alinea you started quoting from:
"In August 2009, 276.9 million people used email across the U.S., several European countries, Australia and Brazil, according to Nielsen Co., up 21% from 229.2 million in August 2008. But the number of users on social-networking and other community sites jumped 31% to 301.5 million people."
Pardon me? 277 million people using mail, 301.5 million using social networking sites?
Am I mistaken in thinking that you actually need an emailaddress to join such a site? How do the 25 something million people manage to get their passwords, notifications etc?
This is just uninspired journalism. Don't know what to write, predict the demise of settled technology X in favour of new technology Y.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
What?
lower your firewalls and power-down your preferences; twitting and booking face are the collective versions of email; your financial and technological distinctiveness will be adapted to suit our own; you will be assimilated; individuality is futile...
There is nothing to FEAR but NOTHING itself; and I fear there is a whole lot of nothing going on. --scorpivs
My mother solved that problem by deleting every email that comes in with an attachment. One of her idiot friends told her that attachments were used to attack computers, and now every attachment is seen as someone attacking her PC.
More to your point, it is not just attachments stored in email. Mom also uses the URL dropdown in the browser as a substitute for bookmarks, and gets upset when someone else uses the computer because it makes her favorites drop off the list.
What needs to be dealt with is the lazy, untrained at the beginning, developing bad habits. How that will get done is beyond me. I don't try and do any computer work for Mom because all she will do is argue with me. If she has to pay for someone to come in and set things up, she will listen to them because she is paying for it. And, I don't get stuck doing tech support from a thousand miles away. Unfortunately, that means email stores attachments (in the in box, of course), and history equals bookmarks.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
What about those of us who do not, and will not, have facebook, myspace, twitter, or anything else of the sort? When did society become so reliant on knowing everything about everyone they have ever seen on the street? If I don't see you at least twice a week, do not consider us "friends," perhaps acquaintances at most.
As mentioned above, if you need to get ahold of me, call me. If you don't have my number, you probably don't need to get ahold of me THAT badly.
Something witty.
I don't get those numbers:
In August this year, 276.9 million people in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and Brazil used email (that's equivalent to 90% of the U.S. population). Last year the same figure stood at 229.2 million, meaning a rise of 21% has occurred. But, on the other hand, this August some 301.5 million people used a social-networking type of site
How can that be if you need an email account to even register at twitter or facebook?
Maybe they meant that email on the mainframe is dead?
I wonder when they are gonna realize that we aren't listening..... mostly because of articles like this one...
Do you have some solution to the "attachment problem"?
Is it necessary for me to have a solution to a problem in order to note that it's a problem? Not in my book. If no one can question something unless they can fully replace it, then we'll make zero progress, ever. Brainstorming is exactly what needs to be done, to get all ideas good and bad out on the table and find what will truly work. I really hate the "if you can't fix it, don't complain" attitude. It serves no purpose.
I agree that email is not a *good* storage medium, but how is it not valid?
It's not valid from a business standpoint for any reasonably organized office structure. That's plain to see in multiple areas such as: searching; backups; organized storage structure; multi-user access; reduction of redundant storage; effective sharing; version control; audit trails; etc. These are all mostly solvable using local solutions, the big issue is that there is no good universal system that handles this transparently. There are dropbox related services that are getting there but they aren't transparent enough to replace the current ease of just attaching a file and hitting send. I'll agree that unless a system is universally supported, it isn't going to be effectively used.
Email will be with us a long long time from now. Not to say it will not expire, it eventually will, just not in near future. Society is structured as a pyramid of services, where services covering more use are layered on the bottom, supporting and being used by higher levels of services. Humans rely on several such base services - acquiring food, necessary common wealth, relationships & communicating, which are provided/made convenient by higher level services - snail mail (post offices), useful clothing etc. Email is another level on top of the level of computing - a basic human need to offload energy use to machines - a very basic abstraction of communication system, also meaning that it is many levels below such services as Facebook and whatever else similiar. You do not remove base service if you have your sanity in behold, and before you can definitely replace it with something equally powerful. Email is so simple and so basic it covers a lot of ground. This is the bottomline. Those who claim it will be replaced better have something equally simple and powerful or they simply have no idea how the world works, which is a whole different problem in itself - the kind of problem that makes you read more books, eat healthier and sometimes subscribe to therapy sessions.
Yes, thanks to the wall-street journal I'll be sure to put all of my work-confidential (and someone will be sure to put their military top-secret) plans on Facebook, myspace, and google docs.
Internal e-mail, internal sharepoints, etc are the way to go. Companies are starting to incorporate internal sharepoints because it saves bandwidth then trying to e-mail 100 people a 5 mb PDF file (which network admins just LOVE). Especially since each time someone modifies the do cument they forward it back to the 100 people...where-as sharepoint can keep different versions of the same document - and overall saves space. That, however, won't replace the e-mail...it just means that the e-mail will contain a URL to the sharepoint site. Unless someone e-mails me I don't go to the sharepoint and most people are like that - how else will I know when someone uploaded a doc that is relevant to me.
But facebook? Yea right....
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
Twitter? :)
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
I modded it flaimbait before, and if I had mod points, I'd do it again.
This sig intentionally left blank.
Emeril...... i was scared for a second.... BAM!
Google Wave (as soon as they open it up to the unwashed masses) has as one of its big features that the "Legacy Services" are invited to the party.
To this day you could write out on a parchment with a Quill Pen a message seal it with a wax seal and then hand it to a guy that can hop on a horse
and then ride to another guy that will ride to another guy (loop here several times) and then hand it to whomever you wanted it to go to.
Someday Email will be seen as being just as quaint but stuff that works should not be discarded just because its "old" (because its dangerous yes because its illegal yes but just because its old NO).
Excuse me i see a messenger at my door step.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Twitter and Facebook will replace email just like email replaced the telephone. And the telephone replaced paper mail.
Seriously. We still use those older technologies for certain things. But some of the jobs they were asked to perform before have been reassigned to new tools.
Telephone was better than paper mail for conversations that needed lots of back-and-forth communication. Email was better than telephone for correspondence that was detailed yet not time-critical. Facebook is better than email for updates that will interest your friends if they have a spare moment but aren't worth bothering everybody in your address book or starting an accidental reply-all storm.
So I think the author is right that we've reached the end of the era when every communication task will get shoehorned into email. But email will continue to do what it's best at (and a few things it's not) for a long time to come.
I didn't mean to imply that you need to have a solution to complain about a problem. A hobby of mine is to complain about all sorts of things I don't have solutions for. Sorry about that.
Aside from the attachment issue- Twitter, SMS and Facebook all have character limits. Email can go on for DAYS (No really, how many times have you gotten some letter forwarded to half the planet that you spend 30 min reading "LoL' and "OMG" till you finally see the photo of a donkey wearing a rain coat)? but seriously folks- yes perhaps the day to day emails over fairly trivial stuff will decline- but I know for my company i answer nearly 100 emails a day, with no sign of it stopping. In fact, its up 25% from last year.
quote from WSJ: "a river that continues to flow as you dip into it." and flood.
I say because they busted their exchange server and are complaining.
To be honest, if everyone clueless about computers just deleted emails with attachments (and didn't send their 20MBs of holiday photos to everyone in the first place), it'd be better than now, where people click attachments from their "friend" without thinking...
There are so many reasons e-mail isn't going away anytime soon.
1) It's a protocol, like the telegraph, not a service like Microsoft/Google/AOL Whatever. You can set up mail servers anywhere to handle anything in any way, and still have it be interoperable with other mail servers on the Internet, provided you're even connected to it.
2) This also means that it's decentralised, no one controls it, not Google, not anyone, you can't take it down by taking down or controlling any company. Likewise there are no terms of service or anything, and you know you can count on everybody using it since no-one can make it go away if they wanted to and everyone's using it.
3) People like simple basic forms of communication. That's why we still use telephones with 10 figure telephone numbers when we could have videophones with sophisticated functions. The same goes for e-mail, it's the telegraph of the late 20th-early 21st century, that's what you use when you need to send text.
4) Like telephone, it's ubiquitous, everybody and their momma on the Internet has it, you hardly can get away with anything out there without having an e-mail set up first. It's your phone number of the Internet, you even put it on your CV or your business card. It's almost more important than your telephone number. Not that e-mail is replacing the telephone, but in many situations it's just more advantageous.
Now as for the problems there are with it. Spam. Unfortunately it's a problem inherent to something as open and decentralised. Anything else? Not really, you could argue that it's not that fancy, but when you think about it, it is. These days you get HTML e-mails full of images and what not, you can send anything you want with it.
Actually, there's little the SMTP protocol prevents you from doing, only things your mail program doesn't allow. So e-mail is safe, for at least the few decades to come. Shall anything supplant it, it should be a new iteration of the protocol that would do whatever SMTP can't do, not a service like Twitter, Facebook or Google Whatever.
You just got troll'd!
and be sure to email me when find out about that cancer cure.
Email isn't going anywhere. ... Everyone has an email account.
Sure; and everyone has a serial port, floppy disks and CRT monitors.
For anything to replace email, it will need to be decentralised. No company will trust facebook, twitter, google or anybody else with their private corporate data. It will also need to be obviously superior to email in almost every way. It needs to add features that people want.
The only serious contender for replacing email is Wave. I've been using it for the past 2-3 days and even as a beta I'm already preferring it over email. I'm honestly wishing everyone I need to talk to had a wave account already. Email will be around for at least 15 years. But I don't think it'll be around forever.
I could be wrong, but it would be prudent not to dismiss wave out of hand just yet.
'No publisher will ever pay you enough to successfully sue them' - Dave Sim
IRC is also dead.
When I only had a sandbox account this summer, all I did with Wave was experiment with writing robots.
Now that Wave is out in beta form and I have been able to invite family members, friends, and some of my customers, I am starting to appreciate Wave as an email substitute.
I am also getting some customer feedback that they might want to build systems layered on top of Wave.
So, I'm all for anything that makes it impossible to keep attachments directly with the message!
A decent mail policy?
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
I like email.
No one has asked me to join Mafia wars, take a pointless quiz, figure out what five food items represent me, or requested I indulge in some disgusting-sounding activity called "tweeting."
From where I stand, if you're "tweeting" a lot, you need to eat more fiber.
Email is great because it allows complete formalized communication, which gives the greatest clarity.
If I wanted to conduct my life through the palsied pidgin of IM, I'd do it that way. But the results just aren't that great.
Feel free to email me any comments.
Futurist Traditionalism
The guy probably emailed the story in to his editors.
Bark less. Wag more.
... if it weren't for all the damn stupid plugins. I'm on it, and appreciate finding out what's going on with friends and acquaintances in far-flung parts of the country. I don't appreciate logging into it and seeing dozens of entries about various people's status in Mafia Wars, Farmville, etc, etc.
The one really good thing about Facebook is it's a much much better Address Book than anything else out there, and they've built forums, messaging, invites, picture sharing, etc. on top of it. It's a very enticing way of improving privacy on the web, since you can actually authenticate+limit who sees the content very easily. The lack of spam is a nice side effect too.
The huge downside is that it's still a closed system. You can't make your own awesome video game and use Facebook for the authentication, unless you build it within Facebook's closed proprietary system with their tools.
It's too bad an open authentication system hasn't really taken off yet.
... and I still don't now. The guy doesn't like people making declarations - you might not share the opinion, but what's flamebait about it? Do we mod down anyone who uses naughty language, or what?
Speak for yourself. I don't have a Facebook or MySpace account, refuse to use IM because it's annoying and don't carry a cell phone (or don't keep it on). I'm not a luddite; I just don't want or need to be that connected all the time. Call or email me at home or work and I'll get back to you when I'm frelling ready. My time is important and, quite frankly, more important than yours - to me anyway. I'll get my "fun" elsewhere thank you. :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Resistance is futile!
For pete's sake, even FAX MACHINES haven't gone away. Why would we expect e-mail to?
Let's not, but since you mentioned it... Messages are "tweets" and "followers are "twits" - ya, you heard me; get over it Twitter users. :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Sadly, an ever-increasing number of people are relying too heavily on Facebook to keep in touch with friends, collegues etc. The problem lies with the fact that relying on Facebook to organise and contact your friends is such a silly move. Email has the advantage that it's an open standard. Anyone can create an email client. However, Facebook is just one entity. It is not an open communication standard and, as soon as Facebook go the way of the dodo, say goodbye to all your friends because you never took the time to ensure you had an alternative way of contacting them such as email.
Yes, but it doesn't solve the problem of email attachments. People are lazy and there are too many steps involved in file hosting, as presently constituted.
What gets me is that these people who say Y will lead to the death of X never seem to understand one little fact.
X will have more reliance and people using it, more experience than Y and have established purposes as well as a mature development base.
If Y fully replaces the functionality of X and improves it vastly, sure it can happen, for example, WWW vs. Gopher.
On a trading floor your best communications route is your voice.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
The worst 'lazy' computer user I ever saw was one of the owners of the company I worked for. While doing a reinstall of his laptop, I saw that his trash folder was huge, so I went ahead and emptied it. When he opened Outlook, he asked "What happened to all my emails?" I asked him which emails he was referring to, and he said the ones in the trash bin. Come to find out, he used the trash bin as his 'archive'. What a lazy moron.
When will people learn that these grandiose 'predictions' are simply cheap publicity attempts?
This, and articles that have false and misleading titles (especially the SlashDot article that stated students were able to take photos from outer space for $150) really hurt credibility, and harm articles that actually tell the TRUTH?
These kind of blatant lies (not like ones that are open to interpretation) are becoming more and more prevalent, with copy editors shitcanning the truth and allowing hack, half-witted pseudo-journalism to take it's place.
This is yet another reason print media is dying. The internet-version of absolute journalistic crap, iReport.com, isn't helping improve the tarnished image of journalism.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Yep, this has always been my impression of Wave too. It seems to me that Wave is just the idea of IMAP, extended to cope with OTHER modern communication methods, like IM, and and twitter.
Spot the odd one out.
That's right, folks. Only one of the above doesn't require lock-in to a single vendor nor depend on a silly "cloud" for storing correspondence.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I'm deluged by Mafia Wars updates, you insensitive clod...
Or, I was...Seriously, there's a reason for the "block this application" button.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
The song "Green Day"? I understand if the AOLers drove you to drugs...:P
Yeah, it's always nice to tell morons Good Riddance, and then hope that they proceed to move 2000 light years away. I understand if Eternal September was as painful as pulling teeth, that it turned you into a basket case. But take a long view - I say "Give me Novocaine and become desensitized". Welcome to Paradise!
Sorry, couldn't resist. :P
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Businesses and spammers don't use Facebook? That's funny, Facebook has business accounts and people complain about spam on Facebook. Now I don't use Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, or many of the other services but reading what others posted above it took less than a minute to Google and find the two links above.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
What did they gain at the risk of look like Popular Mechanics who in 1951 speculated we would all have personal helicopters in our garage?
Reading this made me think of an article in a 1938 issue of "Popular Mechanics". The title called hemp the "New Billion Dollar Crop". Looking for a reference to it I found one on Facebook.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I'm all for anything that makes it impossible to keep attachments directly with the message!
And I'm the opposite, I want to be able to send and receive attachments. With your way for those who want attachments it's tough luck, with my way it's a personal matter.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
It's not valid from a business standpoint for any reasonably organized office structure. That's plain to see in multiple areas such as: searching; backups; organized storage structure; multi-user access; reduction of redundant storage; effective sharing; version control; audit trails; etc.
I have no problems doing any of the things you list as problems with email attachments. I have no problem problem searching my email, backing it up, or organizing it. My email is only for me so I don't have a problem with others accessing it, hell others accessing it would be a problem. Storage is plentiful and cheap so that's not a problem either.
I doubt large corporations have these problems either.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
is it's a much much better Address Book than anything else out there
It's not better for me than my address book, and I don't need a Facebook account to use it.
and they've built forums, messaging, invites, picture sharing, etc. on top of it.
I have those now, I'm using Slashdot right now. I used to use Yahoo! Messenger, I've shared photos, and done other things too. I don't need Facebook to do all those.
The lack of spam is a nice side effect too.
Lack of spam?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Current e-mail is a joke, ResoMail in short time will replace current e-mail :)
ResoMail - the alternative secure e-mail system