I get a lot of email. I also have quite a few people who talk to me via Instant Messenger. On top of that there are the blogs I read. And then there’s Twitter where you can have a conversation, albeit somewhat public for the most part (though private messages are supported).
Twitter-like services are a contender for replacing email as they provide a method of controlling spam. That’s my main message here considering how much email spam I get all day. I spend a lot of time identifying messages as junk or taking the risk and deleting junk messages from my junk mail folder without a second glance.
I set my instant messenger to only show my presence to friends. And modern IM services allow you to send messages to offline people so they pick them up when they log on next time. Spam is controlled.
I pay attention to the blogs I read because the people there have something to say. With the exception of news.bbc.co.uk I don’t visit any other sites for news. I dump blogs which contain too many ads or which just talk about themselves all the time.
I say all of this after half a dozen spambots just followed me on Twitter. I glanced at their profile names and didn’t follow them. They’re not even in my field of vision.
Why else could it work better then email?
- Updates by RSS (over http rather than smtp/pop/imap which would work through proxies better)
- You follow who you choose rather than just attempting to filter out the crap they send you for free.
- RSS has support for attachments. Isn’t this the only reason to really use email anyway?
> RSS has support for attachments. Isn’t this the only reason to really use email anyway?
Er, no. Email has size limitations on attachments that are quite limiting in this day and age. The number of support calls I get complaining about the inability to send even moderately-sized Word documents (with pictures) is heartbreaking. Use megaupload.com, dammit.
Email doesn’t have size limitations. Email server administrators impose restrictions.
Email has failed us completely and should be put down.
Email server administrators impose restrictions to encourage users to use a more resource-efficient method of distributing files.
I don’t agree that email should be put down. IM suffers from spam too, as do blog comments. If I only ever read blogs (or twitters) of people I know, how am I to receive messages from strangers? Do I need to vet them all personally before they can talk to me? How do I comply with Sarbanes-Oxley (or whatever) that requires all business communications (both internal and external) to be archived?
Why not vet people that want to talk to you? You do this in interpersonal communication all the time?
And archiving is a lot simpler if we stiock to a standard, we can sub to the RSS feed and archive the bare information without having to worry about the 300K image used as a signature.
Email is the scion of a lost generation. It’s designed for a network that trusts each and every node.
That’s not 2008.
Email systems don’t _have_ to trust every node – that’s just the way most of them are configured. There are countless methods out there for ensuring the authenticity of emails, but people don’t use them. Such problems will always arise in an open, decentralised system. Twitter, on the other hand, is closed and centralised. Email is far from perfect, but I don’t see Twitter as the solution.
I’d agree that TWITTER itself is not a solution. But a Twitter-alike would work, in terms of verifiable identity.
These ‘other systems’ have no market reach. Twitter is in growth. Twitter doesn’t do attachments yet a service I can envisage would have to handle them as well. I’m just comparing the two.
Add _mandatory_ encryption and signatures to any of these systems. Problem fucking solved. Why is this so damn hard for programmers to implement?
Because of what would be picked? Standard? Great because there are so many of them. And all of them would be opposed by Redmond.
M$ would surely oppose a super-Twitter too, and could easily do so by refusing to integrate it with Exchange, as they do with iCal etc. Unless you can wean the corporate sector off Exchange entirely, email will still be with us.
Well, bugger that. We’ll never get rid of Exchange.