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"Maybe the dream of an email-free future isn't dead; maybe it just means a future in which email is merely a sliver of our communication rather than the whole p
by plehoux 11y ago
"Maybe the dream of an email-free future isn't dead; maybe it just means a future in which email is merely a sliver of our communication rather than the whole pie."
Email is victim of its own success, like cars & highways in America.
Highways are not bad per se, they were and are an incredible revolution. But too much of them means the value we collectively subtract constantly diminish. We need alternatives: walkable neighborhoods, bike lanes, tramways, trains, bus, etc.
It's the same with email, we need alternatives. Chat services like Slack & HipChat are good examples for internal communication.
Email's decentralized nature and ubiquity mean it's the perfect tool for external communication. I don't see why this would change.
- plehoux 11y agoLast week I did a visualization of all email clients in time from '79 to now (http://email-apps-timeline.missiveapp.com http://email-apps-timeline.missiveapp.com). It shows that there is a lot happening in the email space right now, even if the technical barrier to entry, as the author implies, is so high.
- whatever_dude 11y agoGreat chart! Some of those new email clients look great. I wonder if any of them will become solid and popular enough.
- baldfat 11y agoI am still waiting for the application that kills email and the need for clients..
- simoncion 11y agoGiven that the set of folks that are interested in and capable of making widely used end-user communcations software, and the set of people who are not interested in making walled gardens appears to have no overlap, you're going to be waiting for approximately forever. :(
- jakobegger 11y agoThe barrier to entry isn't high at all. The author was able to create an email client in 3 weeks. That's not a lot of time. Yes, making a solid GUI app will take a year. But that's the case with any solid app, and I doubt email is significantly harder than other productivity apps.
- dmbaggett 11y agoIt impossible to overstate how wrong you are. Read some of my comments in this thread. One of the absolute worst mistakes you can make as a developer is to assume that what you don't know or understand must be easy. That's the path to ultimate project doom -- don't do it.
- jakobegger 11y agoI never said that I thought it was easy; I just don't see the email-specific barrier to entry. Syncing is hard in general, dealing with legacy systems is a pain, parsing poorly compliant file formats is annoying... But you have that everywhere. What do you expect? That writing an email client should be as easy as cobbling together a map view with Google Maps? If that's your point of reference, then yes, there is a barrier to entry. In another reply you said that your MVP took 4 years; but looking at your website I see something that tries to compete with Outlook. That's hardly what I'd consider an MVP. I'm pretty certain that I could develop a solid email app in a year. Of course, it wouldn't do everything that existing mail clients do, and it wouldn't be compatible with every email provider, and it would probably be limited to a single platform. But it would do some things differently enough that it would be worthwhile for a few people. If you think there's an insurmountable barrier to entry, you need to take a step back. There is absolutely no need to compete with the best existing clients on a feature-by-feature basis to enter a market. Focus on a small niche, and go from there.
- coffee 11y ago> I just don't see the email-specific barrier to entry. Syncing is hard in general, dealing with legacy systems is a pain, parsing poorly compliant file formats is annoying... But you have that everywhere. Have you ever written a production grade email client?
- maelito 11y agoAwesome vis !
- mhw 11y agoWow, that's great. One immediate bit of insight from the top right of the chart is how the modern email client is almost universally an iOS app, with other platforms if you're lucky.
- mxuribe 11y agoAgreed...but I wonder if that's because ios folks tend to be more interested in products with more design built into them, in other words there is more of a market for a wider variety of products...? Or, if maybe non-ios users tend to think of email as a utility and figure "design-y" products for such "mundane" things as mail are "meh". Mind you, that's not my opinion, but just curious myself.
- aurhum 11y agoreally nice, thanks! another client for your timeline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Internet_Users_Essential_Tool https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Internet_Users_Essen...
- kybernetikos 11y agoAs far as I'm concerned chat and email are essentially the same thing: messages that get sent from an individual to a group of other identified individuals (as opposed to a broadcast platform where you don't have to identify all the user in advance). There's nothing to stop you making a UX for a mail app that feels like a chat app, or for a chat app that feels like a mail app.
- hackuser 11y agoHere's one difference: Chat is interactive and email is time-shifted. Users may use them other ways, but those are the fundamental designs. In fact, I think many problems people have with email boil down to response times. If there was a way to senders could designate how soon they need a response, recipients would be face fewer interuptions and deal with email in batches when it fits their schedule. Email has the priority field, but so few use it that you can't rely on recipients being aware of it and there are no social conventions about its meaning.
- kybernetikos 11y agoI don't think there's really anything fundamental about them that means that chat has to be interactive and email has to be time shifted, I know many people who deal with chat messages in batches much later than they're sent, and people who will respond to email within seconds. I think that's a ux choice, just like encouraging long vs short messages. I do like your idea of designating a response time, but it probably requires too much from the sender. It might be that you could train rules on the client that could do a good job of working out how quickly things should be responded to so your client could batch appropriately.
- 6d0debc071 11y agoI only do email at 09:00 and 15:00 at the moment, I've never had anything bad come of it. Honestly, if something is time-sensitive high-impact, sending an email in a fire and forget manner is close to a firing offence. That's just not an acceptable way to communicate urgency.
- pbreit 11y agoSeems to me you could create an email client that works a little more like Slack but not as ephemeral.
- dghughes 11y agoI think e-mail now in 2015 is like the fax machine was in the late 80s early 90s useful but rapidly becoming obsolete. Sure it will hang on for some reason just like the fax machine has but everyone else will have moved on.
- simoncion 11y ago> Highways are not bad per se ... To pick a nit: in the US, neither the Interstate Highway system nor the State Highway systems have much to do with car-centric design in cities and neighborhoods. [0] I used to live in a vaguely large-ish city that had both a State Highway, and an Interstate Highway that ran through it. These were two four-to-ten-lane [1] roads out of many, many, many other roads of widely varying widths and lengths. The city was car-centric not because of the two highways that ran through it, but because the city managers never, ever made alternatives to private car ownership a priority of any sort. [0] I mean, other than vaguely encouraging individual car ownership by making it relatively easy to cross large distances in an automobile. But, both highway systems play a big part in making inter- and intra-state shipping economical. Not only do we derive a huge amount of good from this property of the system, properly funded and designed public transit systems can also take advantage of these roads to enable city residents to ditch their cars. [1] The Interstate varied in width, depending on where you were. Once you got out of the city, it was most frequently a divided four-lane road.