The worrying thing however is that so many of the touted replacements are proprietary systems like Twitter, Facebook or Google+. For all their problems, www an

The worrying thing however is that so many of the touted replacements are proprietary systems like Twitter, Facebook or Google+. For all their problems, www and smtp are standards - you can use them with a whole range of different browsers/clients, from kludgy bash scripts to the fanciest commercial GUI offering - and they just work. (Well 99.9% of the time). There was a time when IBM SNA, DECnet, CompuServe battled it out - and all lost to the OPEN, and Free (both ways) Internet and it's protocols. Let's not go back.