E-mail is just better way of doing snail-mail, a technology that we had since we first invented writing. One could say that our whole civilization is built on such communication, as one could not conduct business, make a war or govern a country without mail. E-mails is just the same, only faster, and it shares all the benefits with the snail-mail medium. Interestingly, many of those benefits are also shared by... phone.
Why snail-mail, e-mail and phone calls do better than others and will outlast random fads is visible if you look at the structure of the medium. The main features those three forms have that various "e-mail killers" don't are:
- ubiquitous - you can reach anyone...
- distributed and federated - ...anywhere, without caring about whether they subscribe to the same service as you.
The last thing is important. When I send you a snail-mail, I don't know or care how the post office works in your country. When I send you an e-mail, I likely don't know (and again, I don't care) if you pay for your mail server and to whom. When I call you, again, I don't know or care who provides you cellular service. I don't even know what kind of device you use to receive that call.
No single entity owns snail mail, e-mail or the phone network.
On the other hand, with Facebook Messenger you can talk only to Facebook users on Facebook platform. With Asana, I can only talk to other Asana users.
The reasons those services die quickly (when was the last time you ICQd someone? MSNd? or <insert your national IM equivalent that no one uses nowdays anyway>'d?), and the reasons I STRONGLY WISH THEM TO DIE A QUICK DEATH for are greed and hubris. I go to Asana web-page (I don't mean to single them out, apply this to any other similar service) and I can see that idea, "we will replace e-mail, everyone will use our service and we will rule over in-company communication!", floating in the air. No, this will not happen. There will always be people who won't use your service because they don't like your UI or like a competitor more. But what you're trying to do is to throw away freedom of collaboration and interoperability to earn a quick buck. This is damaging to communications, damaging to society, damaging to humanity, and fortunately will disappear quickly into oblivion, like countless other similar startups.
Want to create an "e-mail killer"? Apply some humility. Accept that you will not be The One Gateway to Human Communication; it would be bad for everyone (yourself included) to become one. Just aim for a federated protocol, awesome UI and play nice with others. Sure, success will not be yours only; many others will profit in the same space as you. But embrace that. Wanting to keep everything for yourself is just greed.
Quite a few of these email replacement services seem to add a bunch of stuff specific to some particular use-case. It might make it nicer for that particular use-case, but as soon as you need to do something outside of what's anticipated, it grinds to a halt. That means that any organization that uses something like that ends up using 3 or 4 of them, in addition to email. At that point, it's easier to just use email for everything.
Yes! A thousand times yes!
Being free-form is also extremely important. I think that the best way to add another "stuff specific to some particular use-case" is just to add additional layers of UI over current form.
Look at how HTML mail is implemented - it's just using underlying text protocol. Ditto for images and other attachments.
I don't see any reason for people not to agree on Markdown formatting, folding Org-mode style headings, rendering [ ] as checkbox that will send a special "I'm ticked" e-mail as a reply when clicked (didn't GitHub start to do something similar with checkhoxes in readme files recently?), etc. Just keep the underlying format simple and gracefully degrading to plain-text for clients who don't support your new feature.
Spam is horrible, but filtering seems to work well enough these days. (Which makes me wonder why people are still spamming, but that's a separate post about game theory.)
Unreliable delivery is perhaps on of the biggest problems with email. Largely due to faulty spam filtering.
I'm actually surprised, since I actually expected more spam to get through.
But since you brought it up, let's talk about IRC. I'm betting its lack of widespread success is because of the general UX combined with some historical mishaps.
There are things you need to think about when IRCing, like:
- servers
- channel discovery
- NickServ, ChanServ
- channel modes
Remember that the general population can't use a computer [0]. That level of involvement is already too much for people to start using it without a strong reason to do so.
I remember when I started IRCing for the first time. There was another solution, that captured much more users - the web chats. Those ugly, scammy looking Java applets embedded on news portals. They solved all the above problems, i.e. you didn't care about "servers" or "connecting", all channels ("rooms", they were called) were listed on a website and there were no magic modes or something, just users, administrators and kicking (and you as an user had only to grok what "being kicked/banned" means).
And of course you could post rainbows and cat gifs and animated faces made by a crazy artist on drugs.
Chats ultimately mostly died, having gained the (deserved) reputation of scammy and ugly places. Or maybe because society still thinks that talking with random strangers on the Internet is something weird and/or dangerous, I don't know.
Anyway, back to the topic of technological obstacles. At my local Hackerspace, every now and then we invite people to our IRC channel, and sometimes those people are not exactly of computer-competent type. A good way to do this is to point a person to a IRC web frame, that is pre-configured with server and channel names. From his point of view, it's just like entering that old-school chat, except that it looks less crappy. After that person hangs out a bit with us and likes the place, we teach him how to install and configure a best-suited IRC client.
If the IRC is ever to reach popularity again, I think someone needs to build a, pardon the startupy meme, GMail of IRC. That is, an UI that looks good, hides complexity from you. An UI that lets you click through everything, and explains things like "+v", "@", "-c" or "NickServ" in human-readable terms. With icons and colors and simple sentences.
Then there's the marketing angle, but I bet you, if Google ever built an IRC client for massess, we'd see a great resurgence of this protocol
[0] - http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-comput...
Unfortunately, Relay.js seems to not support colors in IRC, i.e. the "^C3i'm green^C" mIRC encoding. But it looks sweet though, and if one could just skip the "type the server and channel name" (i.e. embed on a community website), it would pretty much mimic the chat experience, only better :).
Anyway, so even if we have examples of pretty, somewhat simple and good enough XMPP/IRC clients, the next step is to get them to the world at large. That pretty much leaves marketing to focus on.
EDIT:
Somebody should bundle a pre-configured IRC server and a webserver hosting Relay.js into a Docker/Sandstorm (https://sandstorm.io/) container set and give it/sell it to companies as "awesome internal collaboration facilitator that improves communication and helps empower the teams to build products for the next generation of the web", or sth.
To quote:
"Recall that advertising is when someone pays you to tell your users they'll be happy if they buy a product or service.
Yahoo is an example of a company that runs on advertising. Gawker is a company that runs on advertising.
Investor storytime is when someone pays you to tell them how rich they'll get when you finally put ads on your site.
Pinterest is a site that runs on investor storytime. Most startups run on investor storytime.
Investor storytime is not exactly advertising, but it is related to advertising. Think of it as an advertising future, or perhaps the world's most targeted ad.
Both business models involve persuasion. In one of them, you're asking millions of listeners to hand over a little bit of money. In the other, you're persuading one or two listeners to hand over millions of money."
Most startups indeed do run on investor-storytime.
"Investor storytime" is a pretty good insight as well.
That's like saying that the problem with home addresses is that there is no directory.
Well, that's why you ask the people you wish to interact with the contacts he prefers. Business cards, writing you a quick email, phoning them,... You know, stuff that works for centuries.
What doesn't work at all is spreading your info for anyone to see and having to spend the good part of a day to fend off cold callers.
It's how people used to get by. It's called legwork.
Email is the ultimate "killer app" you can digitally deliver anything to anyone via email, and many folks use it for all sorts of different processes and purposes. Solutions that claim to displace email don't really displace email -- they displace common use cases that were handled ad hoc using email as a lowest common denominator. Most of these use cases cry out for a more structured solution.
For example, There are 1,000 services that displace emailing pictures to each other. There is probably an order of magnitude more services for managing tasks, approving things, exchanging quick exchanges, or performing any number of other tasks.
But at the end of the day, for the core function of email -- unstructured written communication, email is the king.
Now, what are the problems with e-mail that it's inevitable successor will fix other than, "it's old" ?
Those who complain about email tend to focus on arguing for solutions to problems that don't exist.
Email has one thing going for it that other platforms similarly didn't offer : It's the first personalised, and therefore recognisable, addressing system for an intangible communications platform that's still largely open (Ex: Unlike twitter et al. which has severely limited means of communication and, more importantly, what I can communicate).
I submit that we don't have an equivalent that's evenly matched and so no basis yet to compare it to. That's not to say there won't be one in the future, but I don't see anything close to matching it today or on the horizon.
In the beginning of the internet a bunch of open system emerged: Email, IRC, DNS, ... Nowadays it's mostly businesses that launch proprietary solutions to make $$$. What has changed since those early days?
Although it's not like new IRC daemons are not written, or new irc networks are not started. It's not dead, it's slowly evolving.
* https://jappix.com/ Jappix (XMPP)
* http://gnu.io/social/ GNU social (statusnet/pump)
* http://twister.net.co/ Twister (p2p microblogging)
* http://redmatrix.me/&JS=1 Red Matrix
The thing is: noone uses them.
There has been for years, it's called StatusNet (now GNU Social, apparently) and it's based on the open OStatus protocol. I had my own server federating with the reference instance (Laconi.ca), on which I followed a few users, like Tim Berners-Lee (who mostly cross-posted from Twitter).
I don't think your analogy with vinyl records app as emails are actually the electronic version of the communication method human have been using for hundreds (if not thousands) of years: mails. People know exactly how to use email and what exactly do they expect from emails: - to send an email, you need an address - to receive emails, you need a mail box - once you hit send, you don't have control on the emails anymore, some thing (or post office workers) have control of it - you don't expect to get a reply right away, that lowers your expectation of an instant reply - a lot of emails are replies, which means there is a strong context which is what was said in the previous emails
There are many other good things with email such as the openness, federated and robustness nature of the underlying technologies. However, just from the end users perspectives, it matches perfectly with a communication model that most humans have used and understood for many years, and one that doesn't go away very soon.
Which today, most servers do - they'll hardlink identical mails in mailboxes they control, and fan out those which need to be fanned out.
Email in that sort of medium is just visibly doing the grunt work you need to do for that type of thing over multiple distributed servers. Its no real accident that the Git distributed cloning model pretty closely mirrors this, since it was developed to replace emailing tarballs around for kernel developers.
I don't change my phone number because it's easy to keep it. I don't change my email because the address is tied to a specific provider and getting everyone to switch to using my new one may be impossible.
My current favorite example is Trello as a way of communicating activity status from many to many on many projects. Something email does poorly (but has been used for in the past) and Trello does brilliantly.
But lets look at the points one by one.
#1 everyone has an email address -- sure today they do, and 25 years ago nobody did, and 25 years from now its possible everyone will have a "fooservice" address.
#2 email is flexible -- see my point above, flexing is not the same as serving.
#3 other stuff is great for professional communication but we still use email. -- and before that inter-office memos.
I get that these guys (Front) are invested in email sticking around but I would note that putting an adapter layer in front of it is no more, nor less, efficient than putting an adapter layer in front of TCP/IP or smoke signals or a 45 year old text file transfer protocol, whether or not "email" in the form of SMTP will survive should be irrelevant to Front, the question should be will the need for their service survive.