Slashdot Mirror
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!
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.
Before you can kill something useful, there must be a replacement. What do you suggest as a replacement?
... And so it comes to this.
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.
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.
And it will be replaced by flying cars and personal jetpacks.
Bark less. Wag more.
Ah, video calls, I believe they're due to become a dominant technological force a couple of weeks after Virtual Reality does.
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!
And aluminum pants. Never forget the aluminum pants.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
Because having jerking video and audio that sounds like it's coming from the bottom of a barrel is the future of communications.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Kevin Costner could deliver your messages by hand.
And seriously, things might have to go that wrong before email goes away.
That's retarded. I work for a company that has a massive deployment (not to mention, development investment) in tele-presence. Even we don't use it. We communicate by IM and email and we conduct our meetings not with telepresence but by email. And I certainly don't help our clients via "videomail". I communicate with them via email (or phone on occasion) as per their preference.
People already have video on any smart phone, too. Nobody uses it.
Maybe something will replace email for CHILDREN between the ages of 10 and 15 or 20, but everyone after that will still use email, because it's a necessary system for communication that nothing else can provide or accomplish. People who have some stupid fetish to abandon it are just fucking morons.
...and often the conversation is to organise meetings of groups of people. Groups that may first be simultaneously available at the time you arrange. That's true even in offices. I'll agree that automatically picking email for every conversation in a workplace is insane though.
Phone calls and personal meetings are not always interchangeable with email, they serve different, if overlapping purposes.
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
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.
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.
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.
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! :)
Yeah, that works real well for a topic that is important but has no particular urgency with a colleague who is busy doing something that is both important and urgent. Of course the fact that whatever you discuss is subject to the interpretation and memory of the people involved in the conversations means that it is really useful as well.
Having said that, there are definitely many exchanges of information that take place by email that should take place in person. On the other hand there are many exchanges of information that take place in person that should take place in writing.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
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/
...invites you to "Email article."