Ask HN: I Predict the End of Email in 5 Years, What Do You Think?
My contention is that the email standard hasn't evolved much over the last few decades and that it's quite crude, take for example the process of responding to questions in an email; most users reply with the original text quoted and then proceed to answer inline with a colored tag to distinguish text author--1970's??
So upon thinking about how to simplify this, I came to the conclusion that Social Apps like Facebook already have the answer! Facebook provides a means to post and receive comments without having to quote text, the flow of conversation is much more contextual (and efficient in terms of text stored). ever read an email with 20 or so replies that logarithmically expands because everyone's quoting the previous mail? The concept of a social group and belonging to groups is synonymous with an email alias. you can control access by deciding who's your friend. Attachments can be added. So what can't you do with Facebook or your favorite Social App that you can do with email?? For the record, Facebook has its own email service i'm certain for legacy purposes.
The only thing i could think of is that email is more anonymous in that you could send anyone an email so long as you had their email address. With a Social App, you'd have to be befriended first before having an actual conversation.
So the ultimate question remains, is email still needed! let's say your office got rid of email and adopted some Social App in favor, let's also say that there was some Social App standard so that they were all interoperable, i.e. you wouldn't have to join a Social App every time, you could just use your own. There are a lot companies that use a CRM which is a natural integration point for a Social App Portal.
I'm predicting the end of email in 5-10 years, what say you hackers?!
And if email didn't exist anymore, what's a blackberry to do? can you imagine the interface?
20 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 57.4 ms ] threadThere is of course a function question here as well, i.e. younger people are simply communicating with each other socially (as you note), and so it makes sense to go via facebook.
I think in the work place, email is still needed, as you say it's the only 'anonymous' method of communication. Unless collaborative tools such as group chat, instant messenger, or others, become so ubiquitous that there is no need to have a simple form of direct communication.
until a standard is created to say what should be included in the "communication tool to supercede email", you're stuck using email and loosely coupled instances of apps x, y, z.
it would be pretty hard to get a large company to shift off email, perhaps getting employees onto a social platform in conjunction with email will be a nice transition path.
imagine stepping into a new job and on day one getting an email address and a social app ID. i think this could be a big play that could get more and more users off of email, the old way, and onto the new way.
It's worth noting that mailing lists could have been replaced by blogs and web-based forums a decade ago, but they were not. Before that, usenet was arguably superior to mailing lists, but it was usenet that died out{1} and mailing lists survived and thrived.
It's worth noting too that though newspapers are being killed off by the internet+tv+radio, they are still around, and will continue to be around for much more than a decade, despite repeated predictions of their imminent demise.
So, even if you can persuade me that e-mail will die out (you haven't), I will remain sceptical that it will happen within 10 years. Certainly not within 5.
{1}: Usenet is still around. Apparently.
P.S. "Email's a standard dating back to the 1970's, but amazingly continues to be widely used..." AM radio dates back even further and continues to be widely used also, despite the long-available superior technology of FM radio.
i think social app communication features are much more usable than email, there's also a linkage between users in social apps that can be leveraged to provide even higher levels of usability: CRM integration with contact management, calendar, customer support, etc.
imagine that your company got rid of email altogether and used something like a facebook app for all communications.
i view facebook and social apps as a communication tool with multiple dimensions as compared to email, a social app being a superset of email. so why carry forward email, other than that it's a legacy standard being used by a lot of users at the moment.
imagine business cards of the future:
Name
Social App ID
there would obviously be some time before this would effectively take hold of the greater amounts of users, but i think that time is soon.
if facebook added an administrative interface and made it multi-tenented, the pitch could be to throw out your exchange server over time. i'm not sure what the worth to their strategy would be in the future to take on enterprise users, but i imagine it's quite valuable.
E-mail would be part of how different social networking sites interoperate.
E-mail is a patchwork of proven standards.
E-mail might vanish into the plumbing of the internet --- as ip addresses have and urls might --- but it will still be there.
If my company got rid of e-mail altogether and used Facebook instead, we'd lose customers.
Catchy titles grab attention, but they obscure meaning. I still don't know what you are predicting.
i use email now only because it's a legacy standard though this is definitely decreasing in favor of social apps. this is analogous to television and internet.
my prediction is that a social app will take over email as the primary internet communication method and you will start to see this manifest itself very soon, even inside of corporations.
>> 1. What is the performance impact?
[john doe] this depends on the anticipated load...
are you talking about facebook email? does it prevent you from quoting text?
If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, the Internet would continue to function just fine. If email disappeared, we would be royally screwed.
Facebook could disappear for political, legal or financial reasons. Email can't.
i agree that facebook is proprietary, but i disagree respectfully that facebook is centralized, they have many datacenters around the world, it's a necessary when you're getting 400M page hits a day and whatever many TB's of photos being uploaded. so do friendster, myspace, orkut, twitter, linkedin, etc.
What is wrong with the current group of email standards? And why can't those problems be fixed by extending the existing standards?
Facebook is centralised. It is run by a single profit motivated company. I can't set up a Facebook messaging server. I can set up an email server. Email is distributed because anyone can set up a server.
your point about social app companies trying to make money out of the companies using this is valid, however, today Salesforce.com provides software in the cloud that stores tons of information about sales deals (including dollar figures), contacts (which is priceless), user behaviors, etc. yet lots of the fortune 500 trust them to host and keep this data.