The future of email is Twitter | Hacker News Reader

The future of email is Twitter

virtualpants.com

17 pointsjharrier28 comments

Create a whitelist. The follow model remains, which eliminates spam. You only see updates from people you follow, and only mutual followers can correspond using direct messages

If it wasn't 4am I'd spend time explaining why this is the most poorly considered article I've read all day. Instead I offer a quote:

> The reason that e-mail is uniquely useful is that you can exchange mail with people you don't already know. The reason that spam exists is that you can exchange mail with people you don't already know.

-- John Levine ( http://www.circleid.com/posts/replacing_smtp/ )

How do people willing to make statements like "the future of email is X" not understand that the decentralized standards based federated network is the end goal for an electronic mail system?

If you think the use case of twitter type messages isn't going to eventually be similar then you either think twitter style communication is a fad or you think the tech community is going to stagnate and never move on from how to send short messages to each other.

Maybe that eventual standard will expand to replace email, but twitter? That's so silly it's in Poe's Law territory.

Ok so..

1) The reason for having @ in email addresses is to prevent collisions and identify stuff like who you work for. Between billg@microsoft.com and billg@gmail.com you know which one is the real Bill. Once you give everyone on the planet who uses email a twitter account the name collisions will be horrendous.

2) You're giving twitter a monopoly on the most ubiquitous communication method on the internet. What happens if they delete your account and ban you? What happens if they put something too evil for you in their TOS? You just cut yourself off from communication?

3) .. I could go on

And then Twitter goes down. Or starts doing nasty things as it runs out of money.

The sort-of-federated email network we have now is a lot more resilient than a Twitter will likely ever be.

Geez, is it really time for this thing to make a comeback? clears throat

Your post advocates a

(X) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses

(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected

( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money

( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks

(X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it

(X) Users of email will not put up with it

(X) Microsoft will not put up with it

( ) The police will not put up with it

( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers

(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once

(X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers

( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists

( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it

(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email

( ) Open relays in foreign countries

( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses

( ) Asshats

(X) Jurisdictional problems

( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes

( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money

(X) Huge existing software investment in SMTP

(X) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack

( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email

( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes

( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches

(X) Extreme profitability of spam

(X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft

( ) Technically illiterate politicians

( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers

( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves

( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering

(X) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical

( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable

( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation

( ) Blacklists suck

(X) Whitelists suck

( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored

( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud

( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks

(X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually

(X) Sending email should be free

(X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?

(X) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses

( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem

( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome

(X) I don't want the government reading my email

( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.

(X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.

( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

If the problem is that you have to change email addresses when you switch providers, I think the easiest solution is to use your own domain. Then you can use whatever mail client you prefer, and switch between them freely; you really own your email.

As far as using Twitter in place of email goes, there's the issue of both parties needing a Twitter account to communicate. If you opened it up so that I could send you a message on Twitter without having one myself, you'd probably end up with something like jdoe@twitter.com[1].

[1] Relevant xkcd comic: https://xkcd.com/927/

This is the most ridiculous thing I've read this week.

Here's why it doesn't work:

Remove 140 character limit: That is the essence of twitter. The limit helps me consume a lot more tweets than I can consume long winding emails or articles.

Whitelist: So make it difficult for someone to send you an email unless they are pre-approved? That looks like solving the spam problem with too big a hammer. I think the spam problem is mostly solved btw. I don't get it on either my Hotmail, yahoo or gmail addresses and an occasional spa can easily be marked and future emails get filtered

Hashtags: Google tried to do this in gmail as labels and I think failed. The automatic classification that Hotmail started (to identify important email, email from contacts, etc.) and probably is there in gmail too is the direction. Why make me do the wok when a machine can do it for me?

I think the article said the 140 character limit is only removed for DMs. Regular tweets stay the same.

Gmail labels did not fail..

what makes you say that?

Labels were originally pure labels like tags but now they have added sub-labels and nested labels which is basically the same thing as folders. So they are calling them labels but have basically abandoned that concept and are back to folders.

you can label a message with multiple labels. you can only put something into 1 folder. that's the difference between labels and folders. gmail still has the former, and it works.

Even if you ignore the multitude of problems raised by funneling all email through one company this suggestion is dead on arrival. Can you imagine mailing lists via a twitter like platform, e.g. debian-devel or lkml? I do not think debian or kernel development would be what it is today if twitter was the communication medium of choice. Vulnerabilty submissions to @microsoft-security?

I am surprised that this idea made it to the front page of HN.

Twitter: * single point of failure * one namespace for all users (remember how much AOL sucked? xXAllNamesAreTaken1998Xx) * the service is defined by its terse 140 character limits and the core use case would degrade if this was lifted.

Silly article.

I don't know about others, but I am definitely using emails less these days, but it has nothing to do with Twitter.

Perhaps because my job is relatively mobile, I am replacing a lot of emails with WhatsApp and Line. I have even started to use voice messaging, because it allows me to convey the tone of my message without having to go into an actual "discussion" with someone.

Although after reading other's comments, I am not brave enough to say that this is the future of email...

I also don't really understand the benefit here. Who actually tries to remember people's email addresses? For that matter, who even tries to remember twitter handles?

But...wait. Why is this in any way better than email?

Shorter, easy to remember, identity. No need to build social integration into email because it's already there?

Until the names start disappearing? I can remember that my rental guy's name at Bergsten Music is Greg. So I email greg@bergstenmusic.com. Now do I try @greg? or @gregbergsten? @bergstengreg? And how does Greg keep my request for a quote in his commercial monitored account separate from his girlfriend's emails about what she wants to do that night?

This is more broken than email.

1. This solution eliminates the decentralized nature of email. 2. No solution for corporate customers who would want to keep their emails private. 3. How would new contacts form?

It's a good replacement for personal email. Corporate email would probably need to stay the same.

Probably? You think there is even the slightest chance that fortune 500 companies would consider this? I noticed in your profile that you are a patent lawyer. What do you think would happen if you brought this suggestion up at the next partners meeting?

Respectfully, I think you are mistakeningly assuming that your email use case is representative of the rest of the worlds. Are you subscribed to any mailing lists? Do you ever engage in long form conversations with people in another timezone? Any non-corporate collaborative work with friends (software/volunteer activities/fiction/nonfiction writing)?

no. just no. protocols "continue to remain to be the future". not individual "players".

How is Twitter offering a shorter, simpler, socially-integrated version of email any different than Gmail or Hotmail?

The obvious answer is anyone can run email. Only twitter can run twitter.

If the join.app.net team gets some inertia - that might change, but right now - twitter is a single player (and point of failure) game.

I can easily change email providers and remain in contact with the same people using the service and address they themselves choose. If I grow dissatisfied with these services, I can even go to the trouble of hosting my own email server.

I do not see a competitor to Twitter that is interoperable with their service. Nor is there a distributed option. Gmail and Hotmail are platforms that grew on top of an inherently distributed service. Twitter is a data silo.

And another: I can easily download my contacts and email history and take them with me. It's portable.

That's true. It doesn't have to be Twitter. join.app.net would be a better alternative if it could pick up some momentum.

How is gmail or hotmail the email protocol?

That's your FUBAR right there.

Also, what's so complicated about (a decent) email (client)?

And what's so great about being a "[insert company here] bitch" [1] ? An open protocol is something to build on. Twitter isn't.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/23/fred-wilson-be-your-own-bit...

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