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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."
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.
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".
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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."
I think you'll find that when you DO have occasion to look into your email archive, it's much easier to find a specific email than to find a specific tweet or facebook update.
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.
I modded it flaimbait before, and if I had mod points, I'd do it again.
This sig intentionally left blank.
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 find that facebook fills a niche.
If you want to show people something, but it's not important enough to send an email.
Email is better suited to targeted communication, whereas with facebook you can just post inane crap all day and people will ignore it if they aren't interested.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
will ever be replaced by fecebook and twatter???
I Keep seeing people try and make up variations on twitter to make it more demeaning. I have never understood that. How can you demean something that outright states it is for twits? Let's get this straight: Twits tweet on Twitter. After all what is a tweet? It is traditionally an almost meaningless sound made by a bird to tell the world "Here I am." It has now been expanded to be an almost meaningless message sent over the Internet by a twit to tell the world "Here I am."
How do you make up a derogatory word for this that is more demeaning than what the creator of said system has already done?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
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.