Mozilla Messaging team (Thunderbird) to integrate with Mozilla Labs | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla Messaging team (Thunderbird) to integrate with Mozilla Labs

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28 pointskeyist7 comments

I read too many uneasy references to modern "communication" and "the web" that give me cause for concern about the future of the email utility, here.

Is this soft language hinting toward chasing the "nobody under thirty uses email" tail? I may be reading too much into the post, but the use of any word other than "email" whenever possible is unsettling.

Comments about the pending Firefox 5 already threaten my browsing experience with a dump of "social" that I simply don't wish to have, so it seems feasible that this could be a direction Thunderbird is following, too.

Personally, I want more innovative email functionality. Things that my feeble brain couldn't even conceive of until someone else puts it in front of my face. I could really do without having the client crammed full of Facebook messaging hooks and twitter and FourSquare and other things popular amount the self-indulgent attention-whore population.

Edit: Okay, the page went away for a bit and when it was back up, it was edited to include a few more comments and a bunch of links to things like F1 and Raindrop, which seems to shed some light on where their heads are at.

Am I just being old and grumpy or do others feel it's reasonable to want a light utility that performs one function superbly? Granted, Thunderbird is more than a simple email client, but those things it currently includes benefit the email experience (such as the very useful indexing and search improvements). Do I just need to be five years younger to grasp how incredibly necessary it is to have Twitter and Facebook and URL sharing services in my email client (or all the social stuff Firefox 5 may be looking to include in the browser)?

As long as these things remain extensions that you can add by choice to either Firefox or Thunderbird, it of course isn't a problem. Choices and options are a great thing. The more I hear, the more I suspect much of this will be slowly embedded over time as part of the finished product. And the more activity I see focused on these things, the more I have to wonder if there is actually a demand among the user base for this or if it's just throwing throwing things at the wall to see what sticks and hope something gives an edge over the competition?

I guess the best comparison I can make is the swarming of the market with media button keyboards. Remember how IBM mechanical keyboards were just fine? Extremely good, in fact? And then someone got the bright idea that we needed a button on the keyboard to load a home page for us. And load our email for us. And set the volume for us. And shut down our computer for us. And bring up a Google search page for us. I've never used the buttons. I've never known someone who does. Never actually seen someone use one in front of me. Ever. But they're on every keyboard. Even today. You have to go out of your way to even find a standard keyboard without all the garbage on it.

Is that what all this social crap is going to be? Sticking a bunch of superfluous limbs onto your creature in the Will Wright Spore Character Creator, just for kicks?

I think you may be old and grumpy. No one under 30 uses email? Where are you getting your stats from?

I think you have valid points about how useful social networking features would be; although I think it's moreso about reaching your contacts anywhere they may be, a la rapportive.

I don't even want to touch on your rant about keyboards. I'd hesitate to ask if you own a mac.

Sorry, my tongue was in my cheek when I said that.

Have you not encountered the endless "email is dead" and "only old people use email" articles over the last five years? Google those two phrases if you're not familiar with the discussion. Essentially, the same people telling us how fantastic Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, and other "look at me, listen to me, worship me!" services are strongly pushing this idea that only old people use email (and to a certain degree, they implicate this for IM, too in the last couple of years).

So I have to assume that much of this move to include all of these trendy new proprietary communication gimmicks are an attempt to chase the "email is dying, because young people don't use it anymore" tail. To keep the product relevant in a world where it is just accepted that nobody uses or values email communication, anymore. A sort of hedging of bets.

You'll see anecdotes like one author who asked his sister, who is in college, about how she communicates with people.

   * “Out of my hundreds of friends, only ONE does not use facebook or myspace.”
   * “I only use email to get a hold of old people like you”

Also from an Arstechnica article five years ago summarizing many other reports:

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The Chronicle of Higher Education says that in a study last year, "teenagers preferred new technology, like instant messaging or text messaging, for talking to friends and use e-mail to communicate with 'old people.'" The Mercury News says, "For those of you who have just figured out how to zap spam or manage your inbox, prepare for the bad news: E-mail is, like, so yesterday." And then there's USA Today, which makes the claim that "E-mail is so last millennium."

Those are pretty dramatic statements, and they're based in part on last year's Pew Internet & American life study on teen Internet habits. 87 percent of teenagers in the US now use the Internet, and many of them prefer instant messaging to e-mail. According the report, "Teens who participated in focus groups for this study said that they view e-mail as something you use to talk to 'old people,' institutions, or to send complex instructions to large groups."

source: http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2006/10/7877.ars

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I don't think using these additional proprietary communication methods are about making people more reachable. You can get email on any device any time and anywhere and it's not reliant on a single systems or content owner, like Twitter or Facebook are. I don't see any other reason to include those things outside of adhering to trends. How is using Facebook messaging in your email client any sort of benefit? You have email. The person with the facebook account also has email. So use email. Facebook is no faster and no more reliable and certainly no more secure or private. But it lets you put a funky little square 'F' facebook logo on your materials when you're marketing your application, I guess.

As for the point about keyboards. I don't know how old you are, but when I was growing up, we didn't have these oversized keyboards with dozens of media buttons. You know, instead of pressing the "launch my email client" button on our keyboard, we just clicked the email client icon (or typed 'mutt/pine/whatever'). If you grew up in the last decade, instead of the 90s (or earlier), you might not remember a time when you didn't have these cheap gimmicky keyboards that somehow are still manufactured and sold almost exclusively. You are already sitting at your computer. Why do you need a special one-function button that does nothing but launch an application or load a specific webpage?

Not sure how what operating systems I use is relevant to appreciating real keyboards like the classic IBM Model M (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_M_keyboard) rather than the media-button crammed keyboards of the last decade that are almost all you can find. (However, I use every OS. Windows for gaming, OSX for traveling around, Solaris for work projects, and Slackware and Debian for personal projects).

As a high school student, I prefer email for some things and IRC for others. I despise twitter and facebook and don't have accounts for them. However, my stubborn clinging to not having a facebook account has gotten painful, as that is where most of my peers communicate and I know no one else my age who regularly checks their email. For IRC, no one my age could tell you what it is. I agree; it is a sad situation.

tl;dr but, yea, I agree about keyboards. I went to a decent amount of lan parties in high school and was always baffled by how many kids prefer the tricked out keyboards/mice. I keep an old Microsoft natural keyboard around, but nothing I've used is as enjoyable as an aluminum Apple keyboard. I actually use the audio control keys on it very often.

Thing is, the way to tear down the walled facebook-style walled gardens around social media is probably by making it a seamless part of the web.

Ultimately everything you do on facebook, twitter, and the like boils down to just a few verbs. Someone posts a link or content, and then folk repost and comment on it. Ways to organise and gate the content are provided, and it is all tied together with individual identities.

All this stuff is pretty amenable to abstraction, and could be applied to any sort of content on the web. But that requires protocols and an idea of identity that is built into the browser itself.

If Facebook's messaging service was just their version of Gmail or Hotmail, I wouldn't see an issue with it. Providing a way to use the Thunderbird interface as a substitute to other interfaces for existing email protocols is fine.

But providing an interface to perpetuate that walled-off Facebook-User-to-Facebook-User experience seems counter-productive. And, really, what person is going to both discover and use Thunderbird if their primary interface with the world is Facebook? They probably find Facebook by typing it into Google every morning.

Worse would be if they were talking about actually making the whole facebook experience part of Thunderbird. That you could not only communicate through Thunderbird via the Facebook messaging service, but actually read and post "wall" updates. Talk about feature bloat.

(I know there's no reason to expect that they're going to do this - it's all speculation . . . though I'm sure if it's not going to be part of Thunderbird, it'll become part of Firefox).

When you get to the point that you're facilitating status updates on services through an email client, is it still just about communication? Twitter certainly isn't as much about communication as it is pimping your company or self (or persona) to the world. A rather one-sided "look at me" conversation.

At that point, I don't know how we determine what Thunderbird shouldn't facilitate. Should it provide a customized interface to updating your Wordpress website? Or your Drupal site? (I know some things have APIs that let you just send an email to a service and have the data added to it, such as the add-by-email functionality that pinboard.in has - but I think we're talking about specific added functionality beyond that in the client).

Where do we then differentiate the browser and the email client? It starts to sound like Thunderbird isn't so much an email client for email communications, but that Firefox as a "receive" device and Thunderbird is a "send" device.

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