Vinyl was physical. As were cassettes, envelopes, postcards etc.
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.
It would be interesting to see an alternative to Twitter that is as open as email is. eg: A microblogging system that is built on open standards in a distributed and federated way. Where no-one owns the platform and protocols.
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?
First, money showed up on the Internet. Second, if you don't stand to make a ton of it, you can keep using email, IRC, DNS... No need to launch something else.
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.
It would be interesting to see an alternative to Twitter that is as open as email is. eg: A microblogging system that is built on open standards in a distributed and federated way. Where no-one owns the platform and protocols.
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).
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.