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What Would a Post-Email World Look Like?
jfruh writes "Pundits have been gleefully predicting the death of email for years, but nobody has really been able to explain what will replace email, especially for the medium's archiving capabilities that businesses and governments have come to rely on. It's possible that email won't vanish, but rather become invisible, one component of an integrated communication stream that will be transparent to users but still present — and useful — under the hood. It may turn out that Google's Wave, which was built on this idea, was just a bit ahead of its time."
It isn't going away soon.
I've been emailing back and forth with multiple businesses today. It's not even time to talk about the death of snail mail yet, so why would it be time to talk about the death of SMTP? I say Bah!
I've been waiting to kill email for years, and they won't let me do it.
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
Presumably it will join the keyboard and mouse, which have apparently been just about to become obsolete for most of the last 15 years.
Not that it will matter, of course, because the Internet is mere weeks away from becoming catastrophically overloaded & falling apart and it has been for years.
Is it defined as messages sent via SMTP? Or just electronic messages?
There was email before SMTP, there will be email after SMTP. Messages between two users on a BBS was email, messages between a couple of users on facebook is email. So, no, it won't go away.
A guy can dream. . .
E-mail will replace regular mail. It's been a slow process, but the Post Office (in the US and Britain; I can't speak for other countries) is starting to cut back; The majority of what is being sent out are physical goods and junk mail (advertising). Many people here have switched to online bill pay, and most banks offer automatic payment if the company (rarely) doesn't do bill to credit card.
Party lines gave way to single user land lines, and single user landlines gave way to cell phones. Cell phones are now giving way to text-based near realtime communication like text messages. And cell phones will eventually transition to packet-switched radio communications using VoIP and QoS.
The only thing slowing down these technologies are companies that don't want to lose the massive profits they're getting from already deployed infrastructure; They employ a wide variety of legal and financial methods to ensure that competing/replacing technology as slowly as possible.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
It may turn out that Google's Wave, which was built on this idea, was just a bit ahead of its time.
Nonsense. Wave was just a threaded BB, much inferior to a News client, but graphical, so therefore cooler.
At this point the text based email will slowly be phased out as multimedia video and audio are phased in until email is unrecognizable. Skype for instance may be the email replacement.
Let's take a proven, non-centralized, robust, simple, optionally private, easily implemented, open standard that anyone implement from the RFCs, and anyone can run on their very own computer, and replace it with something centrally controlled, ideally by the UN, US, EU, or Coast Guard, proprietary, make it that people cannot reasonably run their own servers, or implement it from scratch. Bonus points if it can be another vector to deliver advertizements to eyeballs, and tightly controlled so those ads cannot be blocked by end users.
That should fit pretty well with the direction the internet has been going.
I don't email directly anymore, I post on G+, recipients receive it in whatever means they favor, email, text notice, online, G+ account, whatever. If they don't have a google account, it goes to their email.
So yeah, email has become transparent to me. I receive next to no correspondence through it.
That is the beauty of improved technology, making my life easier. It's been so horrible since we've moved away from landline phones and two standard methods of contact became mail/phone/fax/mobile/voicemail/SMS/email/web contact form/Twitter and who knows through which of those you'd get a response.
I'm glad to return to the one stop shop.
It will resemble a world without UUCP, BBS, IRC or (heh) ICQ.
It's the norm now, except for people who knows what SMTP(S) / POP3(S) / IMAP(S) or a MUA etc is.
:wq!
One of the things I really like about email, and it may at least be partially true unless your with gmail or hotmail, that you know no one is sniffing through your data. I know that I may dillusional, but at least I'm pretty sure that marketing guys won't be filtering my email looking for ways to sell me things they think i'll want. I don't understand all these people that are willing to give up all their information for coupons and discounts. I guess i'm just old.
Mean what you say...say what you mean.
Google didn't pull the plug on Wave because it didn't work, it just didn't fit into their business model. The wave protocol is federated, while all other Google services are centralized, Google relies upon all traffic coming through them for skimming revenue from their users. This is why they killed wave and even when it was style in hype mode refused to release a user installable client (free or otherwise). However, the ideas behind wave, most importantly that it allows rich real-time communication with automatic archiving of history make it a powerful evolution of email/instant messaging. Rot in your capitalist filth Google, long live Wave!
They just like to hear themselves talk. It doesn't mean the know anything.
Email is better than twitter, better than facebleck, better than phone, better than texting, better than in person. Email is queued. I can respond to it in my time in the detail level I wish. Email is the best communication tool.
"integrated communication stream"? Is this the latest in manager-speak bullshit? That being said, there are some needs that today's email, even with great interfaces like gmail, either doesn't meet or meets awkwardly and with annoying hacks. Group discussions still have the tendency to turn into a clusterfuck, even with gmail-style nice thread view. And it would be nice if I could, say, create a category of "XXX class homework 4 submissions" and give some way for my students to submit directly to that category so I don't have to manually assign labels to all 45 submissions, and maybe share all submissions with the other TA's (the only alternative for me being blackboard, and I refuse to rely on that pile of bloated rotting carcasses)...
weinersmith
All these other schemes tend to cluster around particular servers or owned infrastructure. Facebook, Skype, Twitter, Google's stuff, etc live and die on the company supporting it. If Google had made good on their promises and released their federated Wave servers, that might have been one launching point where something new could have come around. (Wave in and of itself didn't seem that great, but offered an reasonable point of more complex integration.)
But until some actual, open system that supports delayed delivery and large messages with attachments across personally-managed independent servers, I don't think any of them will encroach on the more formal uses of email.
What does SMS do better then email? It seems inferior in every way. I imagine SMS will die before email does, replaced by IM clients on smart phones.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
I can't see it "going away", globally... in every niche area.
A system whereby you enclose a message and propose a recipient or recipients,
and both sender and recipient have copies that can be saved. I can't see that,
going away entirely, without something that addresses everything that email
can do AND fix everything it can't do, or does poorly.
As far as mainstream for the 'everyman', it has already gone away folks.
You just haven't realized it yet.
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
What death is he talking about? E-mail's life cycle will come full circle - we'll go back to the old reliable pine.
"Hey, Dave" ...
"Hey, dude"
*shakes hand*
"Buy you a beer?"
"Sure!"
*buys dude a beer*
"So where shall we sit?"
"How about on the deck?"
"Sure. So what you been up to?"
I think the older generation like myself still prefer email to texting. Personally, I like email because an immediate response is not expected. I'm much funnier when I have time to think about it. ;-)
I'm also less likely to say something I'll regret later and there is a record. In my opinion there will always be room for that type of communication.
Younger people seem to prefer texting or Skype because communication is more real-time and it's easier to include more people. It also allows them to be braver than they would be over the phone. This is not always good.
...Maybe a bit worse.
...it looked like google wave. But I guess that wasn't future enough.
Now that I thought about it for a couple of minutes, the future of e-mail consists solely of the X-Thread-Id header, which will finally allow to properly sort the friggin' archives. A quick google says that X-Thread-Id has already been proposed by someone in '09!
Once implemented, it will make e-mail 'feature-complete', which translates into english roughly as 'old, boring and forgotten'. After that it will be mostly impossible to get work done, so everyone will become a hipster or die grumpy. Thus the end of our beloved civilization, and the rise of the planet of apes or whatever.
FCKGW 09F9 42
I can't wait to read my first 'invisible e-mail'. Will I need special glasses?
Email is for work
But for non work communication its Facebook
10 years ago all the stupid jokes and pictures were emailed to friends. Today they are shared on Facebook
Its a bit like those History/NATGEO programs about 'Life After People' - the whole question is, what happened to the people will determine what it would look like.
The main thing that will cause the end of email is a disaster that would wipe out civilization. (Gamma Ray Burst,, dinosaur killer asteroid, supervolcano, genetically engineered plague, or Vogon Constructor fleet etc.
Email has a human form factor appropriate for non-audio human communication.
Email is a direct decedent of chipped-stone and clay-tablets. Humans' need a language (audio, visual ...), and society needs records and documents.
IOW: Written email (stone, clay, paper ...) will continue to evolve, until societies crumble and humans go extinct.
What is the next step in societies creating records and documents for transmission (print-share-keep mail, telegraph, email ...)? Maybe we will call it eGraph or ether-image, but the basic human purpose/need will be continued.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
any article whose headline is a question can be answered "no."
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
Add two new headers, both random strings. One as ID for the message, the other the ID of the parent message. This would allow email clients to understand the relationships between messages – eliminating at a stroke (1) the ugly "Re: " in the subject, (2) the messy compounded quoting at the bottom of emails, and (3) the "possibly a reply to..." nonsense in certain email archiving software.
It's so obvious that I don't understand why it hasn't been done already. Perhaps I'm missing something.
I think the one thing they only briefly allude to in TFA is the fact that email can be sent to anyone with email. That is why it is so ubiquitous.
You can't send a FB message to a G+ user. If you do G+, you need a gmail account, and you can't send a message to a FB user, etc.. But if you have email, it doesn't matter if you have hotmail, excite, lycos, or a backwater account on a VAX, anyone with email can reach you. It's the complete opposite of a walled-garden approach, and so long as the "successors" to email try to be walled gardens, they will fail.
A corporation is by necessity a walled garden, so those sorts of internal approaches may work under those conditions, but for overall usage by individuals, I think not.
Who's been predicting the death of email for years? I haven't heard of anything like that, nor have I noticed any reduction in the usage of email.
On the contrary, with smartphones, I've noticed IM and email are slowly replacing SMSs.
Email is actually an excellent form of communication. It's so flexible that every realtime and async messaging system could be usefully transacted over email (and often is), at least every message could use the email data formats (Subject/To/From/Cc/Bcc/Attachment/Body fields, MIME headers, X-whatever arbitrary tuples, etc). In fact every message sent with at least one human endpoint should be transcribable into RFC822/etc emails as a test of its utility and completeness. I had a friend in the 1990s who firmly believed TCP/IP should be restandardized with every packet required to be formatted as a separate email. That's too far (unless packets were bigger), but not wholly wrongheaded.
I hope email never goes away. I do hope that email gets much better message databases and presentation UIs, better integration with non-email messaging (in the same, integrated messaging systems). For example I'd like my every Slashdot post (and other Web transactions) to be indexed in my own storage in email format, and I'd like my emails to be able to HTTP POST/GET/PUT from my MUA. I hope that email finally gets better standardized structure of message bodies, especially for quoting by pointer with attribution, and more nonlinear structures of message sequences. Especially branching and quoting multiple previous generation messages, as well as from separate threads, in a single reply, which maintain coherence among threads.
But that's just better email, not post-email. More and better email would make the world a better place. I hope it does.
--
make install -not war
Low usage by 18-24 year olds may be due to heavy unemployment in that group. Social networking is fine for getting people together to go out, but if you have to organize anything complex, you need a more persistent medium. Try organizing something more complex than meeting at a bar over SMS. Even trying to organize something over Facebook is tough. It's fine for casual chat, but the "everything scrolls off" approach is no good when there are actual tasks to do and track.
For big, complex, highly structured projects, there are decent collaboration tools. Open source projects have had forums systems coupled to bug trackers coupled to source code management for years. There are comparable systems for specific problems, like Autodesk Vault for mechanical engineers and Alienbrain for game developers. Tools for medium-sized loose collaboration have been built, but haven't developed big followings. (Google Wave was supposed to be usable for that.) Those still tend to be run via e-mail.
There's also the problem that single-source "cloud" services tend to go away after a few years. If you were using Google Wave for anything important, you were screwed. This sounds like a case for an open source project, but open source will never get "user friendly" right.
See my comments here: http://ibiblio.org/pjones/blog/looking-back-on-noemail-at-6-weeks/comment-page-1/#comment-441324
And here: http://ibiblio.org/pjones/blog/2008-ibm-predicts-five-future-trends-that-will-drive-unified-communications-read-more-ibm-predicts-5-future-trends-that-will-drive-unified-communications/comment-page-1/#comment-441613
And here: http://groups.google.com/group/diaspora-dev/browse_thread/thread/4cd369bdf16a346f
And here: http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/576771df555e729f
And a related back-burner open source project by me (being passed by): http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
And by others: http://www.semanticdesktop.org/ ..."
http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Semantic_Desktop
"The Internet, electronic mail, and the Web have revolutionized the way we communicate and collaborate - their mass adoption is one of the major technological success stories of the 20th century. We all are now much more connected, and in turn face new resulting problems: information overload caused by insufficient support for information organization and collaboration. For example, sending a single file to a mailing list multiplies the cognitive processing effort of filtering and organizing this file times the number of recipients - leading to more and more of peoples' time going into information filtering and information management activities. There is a need for smarter and more fine-grained computer support for personal and networked information that has to blend the boundaries between personal and group data, while simultaneously safeguarding privacy and establishing and deploying trust among collaborators. The Semantic Web holds promises for information organization and selective access, providing standards means for formulating and distributing metadata and Ontologies. Still, we miss a wide use of Semantic Web technologies on personal computers.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
To the people you "communicate" with. Because now they can very easily ignore you. Apparently you don't have anything important to communicate, you don't have bosses or clients (or do they also have to be your followers to receive communication from you?).
In fact this is the best thing social media did: got rid of all the lolz-cats-licking-must-watch, political activism and check-what-i-did-in-band-camp spam. Now if I get email, I know it's important.
People say I e-mail too much. I joked that e-mails become telepathic so I will spam their brains. Heheh!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
what do facebook, myspace, twitter, google plus, blogspot, linkedin, flickr, skype, itunes, msn (and other) instant messengers, youtube, and just about every other web service (free and subscription-based) have in common?
____
you need a bloody email address to signup for an account.
email ain't going anywhere.
"The moon may be made of green cheese"
"The Earth may be flat"
"A tech journalist may not be lazy"
E-mail will not go away as long as the Internet maintains its structure where no single entity controls it.
Think about it: What do you need in order to sign up for a Facebook, Twitter, Steam, or pretty much any online account? An e-mail address.
Right now the only truly guaranteed way two random people online can contact each other is e-mail. Not everyone has a Facebook account. Not everyone is on Twitter, or on AIM. But everyone online has an e-mail address, even if they don't use it very much, because you NEED one to sign up for these services! :)
Paperless Offices work great. I have worked in one for 6 years. I print one document out a year that I then sign and fax to my consulting firms HR department. The client is an insurance company. The really experienced people bring out photos of what the place looked like before they stated going paperless some 15 to 20 years ago. Desks after desk covered in folders filled with paper. They would show us conference rooms that used to be storage for filing cabinets. The place was dirty with paper. Paperless for an insurance company means the following. When you buy insurance from an agent the agent types your info into a computer. When you get in a accident the claim handler pulls up that information and adds more information to the database. At no point is any paper produced internally. Paper leaves the company in the form of bills, policy documents, and ads. Paper comes in the system via mail from police departments, vendors, and policy holders. This paper is given to a data entry person and inputted into the database. It may get scanned. If the company is not legally required to hang on to it the paper is trashed. This is what paperless office means.
I replied to a couple people but thought this worth posting directly:
What was originally known as Google Wave is really a "federated" system just like email - anyone can run a server, and communications between entities go from client to their server to the 3rd party server to the end client, just like email. The difference is it happens in near-real-time with far less latency than email, including the ability to work "live" with someone else collaboratively on a single document, seeing what each other types character-by-character and where they move their cursor - I've done this with 4 other people all working on one document, it is awesomely effective. Waves can be non-realtime email-like conversations, or nearly-real-time-but-still-hidden-until-you-hit-send like IM or fully-near-real-time like webex style screen sharing. Wave has the ability to integrate with, and thereby eventually replace, email, IM, corporate wiki, and many other services in an ever expanding web as is only possible with a non-centrally-controlled solution. Facebook, Microsoft, and even Google cannot kill off all other forms of communications in the way Wave has the potential to do.
Wave is still alive and being "incubated" by the Apache Foundation (you know, the web server people), more info here:
http://incubator.apache.org/wave/
Specific activity on the project can be seen in the mailing list and code commit 'archives' here:
http://incubator.apache.org/wave/mailing-lists.html
Related, some of the community developers are hosting Wave servers for you to use freely for yourself and even your company (if you don't mind using a hosted service on a "bleeding edge" development server), such as this one here:
http://waveinabox.net/
. Not to worry! Just contact them through some other means and tell them your public key. They'll be able to insert the key into their mail agent, and it'll automatically recover your message from the spam folder into their inbox.
That defeats the whole point of that communication channel. Email addresses that problem by being open, I can just email someone and they'll receive it.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
...invites you to "Email article."
FFS, we still have rotary telephones!
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Currently I get mail through work and though my university alumni account. I work from home, and I get maybe one spam a day out of dozens of emails, certainly nothing to worry about. I have no issues with broken clients or broken servers.
For me at least email works and works well.
Korea
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
...in Nigeria
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
No interconnection means great useless silos. SMTP is the nowadays latin interlingo among companies. I'm hopeless because FB, G+, TT and the like should become a federation (at least in the inter-posting-protocol), which is quite difficult to achieve. In an ideal goal, post shouldn't actually travel, but notifications, and your favourite post-browser would be just a viewer (non storer) of the posted-outside messages. To make it nore complicated, there should be sort of a "ad earnings clearing house" to make it profitable for everyone. I don't think it'll happen ever. Long live to SMTP.
... to all those play-by-mail games on Steam?
Defining Statistics and Social Research
- I haven't seen any replacement for encryption / digital signatures
- I still didn't figure how to mark what I have read and what not on services like FB or G+
- I haven't realized how to mark a post for immediate response of for getting to it later
- I haven't realized how to move a message to specific place so I can use it for reference later
- I haven't found a way to setup my own / corporate server, so I can be sure that my business will continue in case such service will go under
But what I have already learned with e-mail. ...)
- its delivery is almost instant like any other service
- if I need it, I can work with it offline (on the plain, train, ship,
Historically, one mode of data transmission has been replaced by another more faster mean.
Only reason traditional mail service held out so long is because it could transmit relatively large amount of data until the coming of email
(you couldn't exactly write a paragraph on a telegram)
Considering how email can send large amount of data at near instant speed, I don't think email will go away.
I already posted this above, but this is still obligatory.
"Every time someone says we're becoming a paperless society, I get ten more forms to fill out!"
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
Paperless paychecks and automated bill pays are about as reckless as electronic voting machines. 'They' say they're perfectly secure... and you have no choice but to trust them. Think about it: one major solar flare or the financial version of Stuxnet, and your bank has no record of the paycheck your company's records clearly show they deposited. Your ISP cut off your account because your virtual check virtually bounced and without Internet access, all the rest of your bills are now overdue...
BTW, within the breezy attittude of online and automatic (shudder) bill pays is the assumption that one *always* has a plethora of 'cash' in the bank to easily cover any out-sized or unexpected bill without going into the red; quite the 1% arrogance, that.
When you've set up a system where you may not have even one scrap of paper to show as proof of worth or payments, that has to be the loudest whistling past the graveyard since the Subprime pyramid scheme.
email might not be answered right away, but chat is a demand for immediate response. we need a chat bot to respond on our behalf, "get fucked, send me an email and I'll get around to it, or not"
Wave protocol was designed from the ground up to be decentralized ("multiple-source" if you will, "federated" in wave jargon). Just like email. Initially only two wave servers were available (GoogleWave for the public, and GoogleWaveSandbox for developers). Currently, those two are down, but others have appeared (e.g. waveinabox.net and many private wave servers, like mine).
Spam is a total non-issue for me, I never see it. Unless I want to switch the filter off. Spam is no longer an issue with correct spam filtering.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"