4 ms·
Could email be considered an "interoperable" instant messaging service? All it would take would be an email client's layout to be presented a bit more like a st
by nathcd 13y ago
Could email be considered an "interoperable" instant messaging service? All it would take would be an email client's layout to be presented a bit more like a standard instant messaging layout and it might as well be considered a platform with the "back end glue" that they're talking about in the first paragraph.
On another note - and forgive me, I'm a bit clueless on this - is there any reason why email clients/providers couldn't have a standard way to do audio and video calls across services? Then they could do text messaging, file sharing, audio and video calls/messages. Any reason this couldn't happen?
- Wilya 13y agoThe email protocol is built for reliable delivery instead of speed. It's not built for realtime communication. It was built so that mail goes through even if the destination's mail server goes down for a day or two. The fact that mail arrives mostly in real time today is purely accidental. There's no guarantee in the protocols to ensure that.
- saraid216 13y agoOTOH, I've learned to treat IMs as emails to a degree: often I'll send a message to someone who's online and expect that they'll likely see it. This might be a quirk of the clients we use, but it's very email-like. The difference is less one of speed and more one of an ephemeral inbox. (In how it's treated by typical use cases; obviously, IM logging makes it less ephemeral.)