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Email has a lot of warts besides its obvious graces, especially when you look at the back-end of how emails are actually stored and transferred and authenticate
by drostie 14y ago
Email has a lot of warts besides its obvious graces, especially when you look at the back-end of how emails are actually stored and transferred and authenticated. So I think we as programmers are naturally drawn to the idea of developing the email-killer. The central problem with the dreamers seems to be that they're not dreaming deeply enough.
Email is a communications multitool which leverages the whole human subconscious to effect its various uses: a human is supposed to know whether this is a "your boss demands that you do this" email or a "your friend wants you to look at her cute cat" email or "your uncle is ranting about fluoride in the water again" email. Most email killers do not and cannot eliminate this mental overhead. Graham only says "other people should be able to add to my todo list" -- he's not killing email, he's considering an email-aware todo list. That's very common. Skype is not an email killer precisely because it doesn't dream big enough: it is a realtime messaging protocol which hit it big because it worked with video. Trello is not an email killer precisely because it's for organizing groups. RSS is not an email killer because it only solves the limited problem of keeping aware of new content.
Email does all of these tasks -- poorly, but it does them. If you want to really kill email, you need to offer the core functionality effortlessly. Email II would understand "circles" of friends automatically, so that there is only an "inbox" for those people who are contacting you for the very first time. Like syndication, Email II would host the content on the publisher's web server to be downloaded whenever the client wants -- this has spam-deterrent effects, since the network doesn't take responsibility for the content. It would hopefully allow us to unify mailing lists. We can protect privacy with automatic cryptography; "chris::example.com" can stand for a public key which is stored on the example.com machines. The email killer needs to be good at segmenting messages so that we can say "This is the text of my invitation to a wedding, but it also comes with a standard-appointment-form where I describe where and when it is, so that it can be rapidly added to your 'upcoming dates' in the relevant social circle." (Since this must merge with dates and todo-lists, presumably example.com contains its own list of stuff which chris::example.com has stored for his own use.)
And I want to at this point admit defeat: because I think even those ideas are not daring enough. The email killer is probably going to have to do even more than all of that, and my own imagination becomes limited.
- gatlin 14y agoI'll be honest - XMPP fits this description pretty well, at least as far as I read it right now. Most clients don't seem to understand this but that seems tractable.
- joe_the_user 14y agoIndeed, that email has everything inside is as much its strength as its weakness. It is as unlikely to go away as it is unlikely to remain unfiltered and unchanged. Where the "killing" begins and the extension begins is basically fuzzy. You could create an "Email II" that had present day email as its transmission layer or which had some other transmission layer as it's base. There's a wide area of innovation still available here.
- taliesinb 14y agoThis. It's email clients that are broken, not email. For example, the most imaginative thing we can do with long email threads appears to be to flatten them and render them as a list. Not to mention filtering and categorizing: in gmail, you can't even check in a filter if someone is in your contacts -- your gmail contacts -- let alone whether they fall into a particular contact group.
- joe_the_user 14y agoI feel like that's weirdly true and false. Yes, email clients are "broken". It is "easy to see" that fixing them is the key to really useful communication. The weird thing is that any time you get one of these "broken" mediums, its users nonetheless become adapted to it. Even the stupidest original behavior becomes a part of a common, even socially, understood medium and changing it thus becomes harder. An old girlfriend of mine was not terribly computer literate but understood the trick of clicking on an email link in Internet Explorer, having an outlook express window come up and then copying the resulting email-address to her webmail account to send an email. Once she learned this trick, she was far less concerned about the round-about-clunkiness involved in the whole process than I would be. It was just "how computers worked" and a simpler process she didn't know would quite possibly confuse her. She probably wouldn't even know that Outlook Express was an email client itself, for example.