Hello,
Few days ago Peter Schooff asked a question (Editor's Note: the Forum question is here) about email existence in the WEB 2.0 culture.
My answer is clear: YES.
For me it is very simple. Email is a protocol. It is not proprietary.
Anybody can (and does) develop their tools and it will still work. The fact that I can send emails from Outlook to Notes or IncrediMail and still read it, that is the winning formula.
On the other side, Google Wave, Twitter or Facebook force us to login to their proprietary server.
Can you write something in Twitter and get it on Facebook? How much effort it takes from Tweeter and Facebook developers?
Can you do the same with any Social network server? Probably not.
Email would work for all the above.
Please do not hesitate to share your comments with me.
Yours,
Noam
Few days ago Peter Schooff asked a question (Editor's Note: the Forum question is here) about email existence in the WEB 2.0 culture.
My answer is clear: YES.
For me it is very simple. Email is a protocol. It is not proprietary.
Anybody can (and does) develop their tools and it will still work. The fact that I can send emails from Outlook to Notes or IncrediMail and still read it, that is the winning formula.
On the other side, Google Wave, Twitter or Facebook force us to login to their proprietary server.
Can you write something in Twitter and get it on Facebook? How much effort it takes from Tweeter and Facebook developers?
Can you do the same with any Social network server? Probably not.
Email would work for all the above.
Please do not hesitate to share your comments with me.
Yours,
Noam
Considering you need email to confirm or verify membership to any of these sevices, um, yeah, I think email will rock on forever.
Thats the beauty of email. You can use one email account and have all the crap from a dozen different social networks all feed into it. Easy.
Actually, Google is releasing the federation protocol, which would allow anybody to host a wave server, and have it communicate with other servers, so it is like email in that aspect as well.
Noam, This thought is fast catching up and opened new debates in industry parlance. No doubt that social media has evolved very fast recently to challenge not so old practice of communication through emails but I think it has still a long way to go really replace email.
Noam, Google is well aware of this factor and that's why they've made the risky decision to turn Wave into an open protocol. Once it is released, you or I or any bunch of open source developers will be free to run their own servers and develop new clients.
The real bottleneck will be connectivity. Wave will require a lot of back-and-forth between servers, as compared to e-mail which is a one-shot deal. Wave could replace e-mail in the big cities but will probably not be workable for people with slow connections in rural areas and the developing world.
That is a very nice point that you made on your post. The compatibility of email makes it universally popular. Not many other systems can boast of such a capability. Hope there is as versatile a tool as email in the physical world that can tackle the energy issue that we all face. We run a directory called the website of Climatarians which lists websites and blogs on environmental issues.