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Email will always be around, but I must say that "Email killers" are really going to be successful. For example, I don't remember the last time my team sent an
by 3pt14159 12y ago
Email will always be around, but I must say that "Email killers" are really going to be successful.
For example, I don't remember the last time my team sent an internal email that wasn't a forward from a client. We use Slack. Exclusively. We organize projects around it, sales efforts, everything. It has the async nature of email, the separation of topics like email, and the search power of email. It also means that none of us ever feel like we're out of the loop.
- dsr_ 12y agoHow disrupted will your company be if Slack is purchased by Yahoo and is EOL'd with 30 days notice? To do that to email, you'd have to dismantle DNS.
- Aqueous 12y agoUnfortunately, the "nobody owns" feature of EMail is something Slack lacks and probably always will. Email is a federated, decentralized protocol of distributed mail servers that anybody can set up. Any email server can participate with any other email server. That's something that Slack will never have (it does interface with XMPP and IRC, but the service itself is centralized.) It is hard to overstate how critical this fact is to Email's future. If you look at most of the canonical Internet protocols (SMTP, HTTP, DNS, XMPP, IRC, even BitCoin) - they have this fundamental feature in common. Even though they're part of the application layer of the Internet, they've become fundamental protocols that other technologies rely on. They are part of the infrastructure of the Internet. I say this is someone who just started using Slack and loves it. I still can't see it replacing email, though.
- zmmmmm 12y ago> XMPP, IRC I actually think these guys are interesting exceptions. Yes, they are still around, but they've largely been eclipsed by proprietary solutions. Why? Why did Twitter storm to success XMPP was ostensibly the same thing but with all of these good qualities (open, federated, decentralised, etc.). Still to this day messaging is a battleground for new entrants touting completely opaque solutions. It seems like there's something more to success than just being open, federated and decentralised.
- Aqueous 12y agoXMPP is one of those things that billions of people use without knowing it. Facebook Chat and GChat for a long time (and maybe still now) were actually just branded XMPP solutions - Facebook (annoyingly) shut off federation, keeping in the spirit of their walled garden approach, but GChat still interoperates with other XMPP servers if I'm not mistaken. Edit: GTalk shut off federation for XMPP extensions like multi-user chat and Jingle (Voice-Over-IP). As for IRC - yes it has been largely eclipsed by proprietary solutions. I chalk this up to the lack of a compelling, truly simple web front-end for it. For instance, Slack seems to imitate a lot of the feature of IRC - it would be easy enough for it to just be IRC underneath, and maybe it is. But as far as I know nobody ever wrote a true web client for IRC that was compelling enough for the mainstream.
- mikaraento 12y agoXMPP's federation is great, but it's a real pitas to scale up a single domain (long-lived connections, implementations typically assuming one node, dialbacks). The gtalk team had a really hard time with it. Http is a lot easier to scale.
- chippy 12y agoTwitter originally had a chat interface. It's where most people I knew, used to use it - via pidgin. I think it was an AIM bot.
- blowski 12y ago> I must say that "Email killers" are really going to be successful. I remember people saying that in about 1998. Email killers have been successful, but not at killing email.
- mverwijs 12y ago> We use Slack. I'm saddened and proud that every time I read that sentence, I initially think the person is using Slackware.