My opinionated 2¢ on why e-mails will live while many an "e-mail killer" dies mourned by no one.
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.
I'd add one more thing to ubiquitous, distributed, and federated, and that's free-form.
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.
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.)
Filtering doesn't work well enough at all. The fact that you can't be sure if your email was received is a problem. Many companies have over-aggressive spam filters and the recipients sometimes never even see the emails in their spam box - they're either bounced or black-holed. Often this is done by blacklisting IP addresses. When that IP happens to be the mail server of a service provider with many customers, when one of them sends spam, all of them get their emails blocked.
Unreliable delivery is perhaps on of the biggest problems with email. Largely due to faulty spam filtering.
There's also the fact that the email format (something that is specifically not instant or near-instant, is primarily text, and works well in limited bandwidth situations) is well suited to interplanetary messages. I hope we will have that "problem" soon!
I agree with your reasons, but it's interesting to consider that realtime IM is one area that, while there exists a standard, simple, and scalable protocol that's been around for a long time - IRC - it's nowhere near as popular as the proprietary alternatives that followed. IRC usage is declining, and of the people I know, the majority have never heard of it. Yet almost everyone knows about email, AIM, MSN Messenger, and now Skype. What lead to this huge difference? Is it just the triumph of marketing client software, or is there something else?
IRC is for multi-user on-topic chats (eg: support, help channels, or specific topics, etc), while XMPP is more for personal IM. Plus, XMPP is open, standard, and decentralized.
There's IM the one-to-one communication, and there's IM the multi-user chat. Those are two different concepts, they have their own mechanics of working and are treated differently by society.
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:
that all boil down to a. thinking, b. learning, and c. typing magic incantation into a command prompt. It all gives off this complicated, "techie" vibe.
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
Relay.js is a user friendly IRC client, see http://relayjs.jit.su/ for a demo. Converse.js (https://conversejs.org/) is an XMPP web client that supports XMPP conference rooms. So I'd say we already have good, nice-looking clients and there's room for improving integration on a single service to reach for the masses.
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.
I assume the only reason people boldly claim they will kill email is so they can get VCs excited about their disrupt strategy. It's always about taking out an entire existing industry or system (see Uber).
I think that Maciej Cegłowski got it right in his talk [0] with the concept of investor storytime.
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.
I've re-read that a few times (and created my own local copy with some simplified and fixed HTML -- it's missing a section heading and has a slew of un-closed anchors). My opinion of it continues to climb. It's well up my list as one of the ten best recently written essays I've read this year. Maciej posts here as "idlewords".
"Investor storytime" is a pretty good insight as well.
There are a lot of people for whom I have no email address, but whom I can reach at a moment's notice on Facebook. The problem with email is there is no directory, whereas on Facebook it's easy to search for "Friends of Joe named July" or what have you and get in touch with them.
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.
How do I ask them how they prefer to be contacted if I can't contact them? Imagine an old friend or acquaintance or someone you briefly met at a party. A Facebook friend request is hardly intrusive or difficult to ignore.
FOAF. If you can't reach someone directly, find someone who might be able to. Through their work, friends, organizations, etc. Much of that is fairly easy to work out.
It's how people used to get by. It's called legwork.
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.